
Author . 



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TECHNOCRACY 

FIRST AND SECOND 
SERIES 



Social Universals 



By William Henry Smyth 



FIRST SERIES 

PARTI. 

Human Instincts in Reconstruction: 
An Analysis of Urges and Suggestions for Their Direction. 

PART II. 

National Industrial Management: 

Practical Suggestions for National Reconstruction. 

PART III. 

Ways and Means 

To Gain Industrial Democracy. 

PART IV. 

Skill Economics 
For Industrial Democracy. 



SECOND SERIES 

PART I. 

Magic Money, Money Magic and the Magician; 
The Payers and — the Fading Smile. 

PART II. 

The Method of Solving Problems Generally 

And Our Social Problem in Particular. 

PART III. 

A Working Method for a Workable Understanding 

Of the Social Problem and of a Workable Reconstruction. 

PART IV. 

Labor, Skill, Tally, Organization and Their Functions: 

Production, Distribution, Direction. 



Social Universals 



Copyright, 1921, ■)y W. H. Smyth. 

0)CiA608797 
m 24 1921 



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Reprinted from the Gazette, Berkeley, California 
Copyright, 1920, by W. H. Smyth. 

Technocracy 

PART I. 

Human Instincts in Reconstruction. 

An Analysis of Urges and a Suggestion For Their Direction. 

By William Henry Smyth 

Note — The author shows that the forces of the four great human 
instincts — to live, to make, to take, to control — are as essential in mod- 
ern social life as at any time in the past. But all of these urges in a 
living democracy should be controlled without being controlled. To 
achieve this seeming paradox we must have a great national purpose, and 
unselfish leadership such as could come through a National Council 
of Scientists. 

Mr. William Henry Smyth has been in general practice as a con- 
sulting engineer since 1879. He is the inventor of many machines and 
mechanical devices, including a system of raising water by direct 
explosion on its surface, the device being known as the "direct explo- 
sion pump." He has been an engineering expert in many patent cases, 
and is a frequent contributor to technical journals. As well as a pioneer 
in mechanics, Mr. Smyth is a pioneer in economics. He is a member 
of the leading scholarly associations in that field, including the Amer- 
ican Economic Association and the Royal Economic Society of Great 
Britain. 

Parts I, II and III appeared originally in "Industrial Management" 
of New York. The concluding PartIV has not heretofore been published 
and will appear exclusively in The Gazette. — Editor. 

Instincts Control. rapid extinction of the race. Thus it 

Instincts are the most persistent would seem that our fundamental 

human urge factors. Seemingly, instincts are essentially necessary to 

they are less subject to change than human contmuance— at least, to our 

even the most unchanging aspects '°^'^^ existence So _ let us look 

of our physical environment. once more at these vital factors, m 

rp, T <•• V. i T • /- ir the light of recent events, in order 

ihe instinct to Live (selt-preser- .^ ^„„ i„. , .1 ' , , 

„.• ^ • A • .• ^ X to see what part they now take and 

vation) is as dominating today as „ i-i „i .„ ' ,„ • ., r ^ • 1 

.u A r are likely to play in our future social 

in the days of our cave-man an- ^„„„„.^,, 

ill T i- ^ i c ^ 4. economy, 
cestors; the Instinct to Construct 

is as persistent in Man as in the Brute Force, 
beaver; the Mastery Instinct (desire No lesson of the war, probably, is 
to control others) is as vital as more obvious or more clearly de- 
ever; the Thievish Instinct (desire fined than the rapid trend toward 
to acquire and hoard) shows no Skill as a predominating and con- 
change, and is the same old urge trolling factor in our immediate so- 
as that disclosed by the pre-man cial development. 

stores of insects, birds and various Recorded history and archaeologic- 

animals. al investigation confirm the sugges- 

Indeed, without these primordial tion that in the matter of economic 

urges Man could not have developed, control of human activities and their 

and the loss or atrophy of any one products, the possession of this con- 

of them would probably mean the trol has oscillated to and fro under 



TECHNOCRACY 



the influence of one or other of the 
instinctive urges, so that character- 
istic types of men secured alternate 
mastery. 

Starting in the pre-human period, 
before the dawn of definite self-con- 
sciousness, and continuing during 
eons in the twilight of human intelli- 
gence, raw brute force must have 
been the dominating economic factor. 

The influence of Skill during this 
period was practically negligible, ex- 
cept in so far as it afifected indi- 
viduals. Of this the huge prolonga- 
tion of the unchanging "Stone Age" 
is sufificient demonstration. 

Contest With Cunning. 

The gradual growth and rapid 
culmination of the Skill factor is 
an important consideration in our 
present inquiry and likewise in our 
Social Reconstruction problems. For 
while Purposive Skill is of slow de- 
velopment Purposive Cunning, on the 
contrary, is inherently otherwise. 
Indeed, Cunning and Purposiveness 
both imply mental alertness and 
hence are in some wise synon- 
ymous. 

For these reasons, in the early 
stages of human development, raw 
strength and animal cunning must 
alone have contended to satisfy the 
other insti-nctive urges — to live, to 
control — practically uninfluenced by 
the relatively modern urge of Pur- 
poseful Skill. 

Doubtless this simple conflict (of 
raw strength and brute cunning) 
waged with varying results, slowly 
oscillating, age by age and race by 
race, in favor of one or other human 
type as environmental conditions or 
racial admixtures gave one or other 
the advantage of circumstance. 

And, as Economics implies: the 
usages, laws, and institutions where- 
by a community endeavors to or- 
ganize its methods and means of 
living: those whose activities char- 
acterize the times initiate and ad- 
minister its economics. 

Age-Long See-Saw. 

So, with these age-long oscilla- 
tions of control types, economic in- 
stitutions necessarily underwent like 
changes, conforming to the dom- 
inating human characteristics of each 



Age and Nation. That they did so 
oscillate and economically conform, 
in the vaguest dawn of human be- 
ginnings, is the teaching of archae- 
ology. 

During the past few thousand years 
the contest of Strength and Cun- 
ning is shown by reliable historical 
records to have oscillated with com- 
parative • rapidity between one and 
the other extreme — including consid- 
erable periods during which Strength 
and Cunning unified control by 
union of Church and State. 

Prior to the immediate present was 
a transition stage caused by the 
gradual weakening of the bond be- 
tween Church and State, with a 
coincidental shifting of control in 
favor of Cunning (under a changed 
and relatively modern guise repre- 
senting the instinctive Urge to 
Take) expressing itself as Commer- 
cialism. With this change came a 
consequent modification of usages, 
laws, and institutions appropriate to 
its highest expression — Capitalism — 
capitalistic economics. The result of 
this last oscillation of control in 
favor of (acquisitive) Cunning was 
that Germany became a nation of 
slaves, England a nation of paupers, 
France quit breeding, and the United 
States went wealth crazy! 

Challenge by Purposive Skill. 

The war represents the conclusive 
termination (in this period) of the 
age-long contest of Force and Cun- 
ning — for the control of men, and 
the products of their activity. 

But this last and most spectacular 
conflict is complicated by the intru- 
sion of the most modern and most 
rapidly developing factor — Organized 
Purposive Skill. 

Here, then, Skill enters the arena 
with a challenge to both earlier con- 
testants — for the prize of human 
control, and mastery of the social 
machinery; enters that contest — older 
than the race itself — the_ struggle to 
satisfy the primordial instincts: to 
Live — to Control — to Take. 

Strength vs. Cunning vs. Skill. 

Thus the contest has become a 
triangular fight between the Strong, 
the Cunning, and the Skilful; a fight 



TECHNOCRACY 



in which raw brute force is a par- 
ticipant of rapidly diminishing im- 
portance — a modified continuation of 
the old time bloody contest, for a 
humanly undesirable outcome. 

Cunning-control is today the vic- 
tor, and in possession of the spoils — 
the financial wealth of the world. 
But all the evidence points to a 
short enjoyment and a losing fight 
against the organized forces of Pur- 
poseful Skill. 

Creaking Capitalism Cracking. 

Capitalism — under war stress — 
shows convincing evidence of in- 
adequacy. The non-efTectiveness of 
money and credit wealth has be- 
come so obvious as to procure the 
enactment of "Work or Fight" laws. 
Thus, into the discard went our pre- 
war money evaluation of men to be 
substituted by a standard which 
measures millionaire and hobo alike 
in accordance with their relative 
skill. 

Our pre-war faith in the mysteri- 
ous Magic of Money too received a 
staggering shock when all the pri- 
vate fortunes enmassed and all the 
billions of national credit combined 
utterly failed to add a single pound 
of much needed sugar to our limited 
supply, necessitating the "two pounds 
of sugar per person" apportionment 
— a commonplace vulgar fraction 
measure applicable to Financial 
Potentate and Weary Willie — alike! 

Producer Versus Parasite. 

On broader lines also the evidence 
points the same way: purposive skill is 
inherently productive, while purpose- 
ful cunning is naturally parasitic. 
Then, the capability of cunning to 
rule, and the continuance of its suc- 
cess in controlling others, resides in 
and depends upon the stupidity and il- 
literacy of the governed: mystery and 
magic are its weapons — equally in the 
realm of modern Finance as in the 
ancient Theocracies. 

Skill implies the reverse of all this, 
for skill is intelligence physically 
manifested. It is knowledge of Na- 
ture's Laws utilized dexterously — and 
the spread of scientific information 
characterizes our age. Thus as the 
bulwarks of cunning-control crumble. 



the weapons of skill are multiplied and 
perfected. 

So the outcome seems a foregone 
conclusion. 

With this outcome, our methods 
of life will necessarily change. Capi- 
talistic customs, laws, and institutions 
will be substituted by others diflfering 
as widely from those with which we 
are familiar as the motor ideas and 
ideals of purposeful cunning differ 
from those of purposeful skill. 

"Work or Fight" Lesson. 

Peradventure, the "Work or Fight" 
and the "2 pounds of sugar per per- 
son" measures are tonic foretastes of 
the coming Skill-Economics. 

Obviously we are in transition to a 
new social order. 

The signs of the times portend the 
dethroning of decadent acquisitive 
capitalism and the crowning of pro- 
ductive skill — Autocrat of the new 
Age — Artizanism. 

This change has been in dubious 
process for years; the War has merely 
speeded its progress and made the 
outcome practically inevitable. But, 
whether it be brought about by evolu- 
tion or revolution, or whether it comes 
in clean-cut aspect or befogged by ir- 
relevant social factors and forces, it 
is in no sense a rational or final so- 
lution of our "social problem." 

In any event, should Artizanism 
come, it will be merely another social 
spasm, probably shorter than, but 
equally as futile as, our present world- 
wide finance madness. 

Instincts Not A Rational Basis. 

While it is conceivable that human 
societies could be organized upon and 
with any one of the stated basic In- 
stincts as dominant factor and 
raison d'etre; it is practically certain 
that any such national society would 
be quite ineffective, and transient. For 
obviously it would not and could not 
satisfy even our present limited intel- 
ligence, our rational imagination, or 
our modern spiritual ideals. 

No very extended analysis would be 
required to show the validity of this 
proposition. The past has already 
demonstrated the insufficiency of so- 
cieties based upon the Mastery In- 
stinct — Autocracy. The present amply 



TECHNOCRACY 



proves the failure of the Acquisitive 
Instinct as a social basis — Plutocracy. 
A moment's thought will show that 
a society based upon the Making In- 
stinct would simply crumble in its 
formative process under the demands 
of our complicated modern mental 
make-up, for clearly this instinct pro- 
vides inadequate Human scope — and 
hence presupposes parasitism in even 
more extended form than that of ac- 
quisitive Capitalism. And — worse 
than all — a society based upon the In- 
stinct to Live and Propagate, would 
return us at once to the brute state 
from which we have arisen through 
ages of struggle, strife, and bloodshed. 

Control Without Control. 

Still, it is apparent that the basic 
instincts which urge "to live," "to 
make," "to take," "to control," are as 
useful, yes, are as essential in and to 
modern social life as they have been 
in all the past. But, while all are 
necessary, no one of them constitutes 
a proper basis — law of operation — for 
a rational human society organization. 
They are factors, necessary and desir- 
able contributary parts, no one of 
which is inherently adapted to func- 
tion as the machine's unifier, its strain 
and speed equalizer — its control cle- 
ment. 

Thus, the determination of a suit- 
able character of "control" element is 
seemingly the crux of our social prob- 
lem; the problem of controlling with- 
out control, that old, old paradox: 
Freedom made effective by restraint — 
a paradox, however, which the war 
may have resolved for us, by demon- 
strating its non-existence. 

It has, in somewise, answered our 
troublous question by clear definition 
in the statement of the Nation's ob- 
ject in going to war. 

The war has answered the question, 
in another aspect, by the Nation's 
adoption of the method (forced upon 
it by logical compulsion) whereby 
success was achieved. 

"To make the World safe for De- 
mocracy" is the clearest and most uni- 
versally accepted statement of our 
purpose in going to war — Self-govern- 
ment for Nations, Self-government for 
Individuals. 



Concept of Control. 

Control by others, then, is antitheti- 
cal to the ideals for w^hich we have 
waged this last, the greatest, and, 
it is hoped, the final bloody contest for 
Self-government. 

Control is equallj^ antithetical to our 
Ideals of Self-government whether the 
control is exercised by "others" char- 
acterized by the Instinct to live and 
breed — the Masses; or whether the 
control is exercised by "others" char- 
acterized by the Instinct to Make — 
the Skilled Artizan; or whether the 
control is exercised by "others" urged 
by the Instinct of Mastery — the Em- 
ployers; or whether the control is ex- 
ercised by "others" under their domi- 
nating Acquisitive Instinct — the 
Financiers. 

Indeed, the concept: control by 
"others," is an idea inherent in and 
appropriate only to now discredited 
Autocracy — a concept which the War 
has rendered an obsolete ideal — if we 
are yet intelligent enough to profit 
by its costly teaching. 

Discard Cave-Man Control. 

To be rationally consistent this 
"control" concept should be as ab- 
sent as it is obsolete (in fact and 
effect) in our inevitable reconstruc- 
tion. 

This Autocracy "control" concept 
must be thrown in the discard where 
we have dumped the European auto- 
crats whose ideal it was — if our recon- 
struction efforts are intended to pro- 
duce a rationally organized Modern 
Human Society; a Society founded up- 
on the Ideals consecrated by the life 
blood of our bravest and best. 

But our age-long familiarity with 
"control by others," in our halting 
progress, from brute beast to modern 
Man, has so deeply ingrained in our 
mental fiber this stone-age concept as 
to make it almost impossible for us 
to even conceive the idea of a society 
lacking this cave-man spiked-club 
element. 

Yet, no fact and lesson of our par- 
ticipation in the War is more clear 
and free from doubt than the spon- 
taneous acquiescence by the people of 
the United States — rich and poor, arti- 
zan and laborer, alike — in self-control, 
self-repression, self-dedication to the 



TECHNOCRACY 



united will and nniiied purpose of the 
Nation. 

Purpose. 

No lesson of the War is more 
significant than: Given a National 
Purpose, intelligently comprehended 
and acquiesced in — only unselfish 
Leadership is needed, and . neither 
control by force nor control by 
cunning is necessary to bring about 
the unification of effort needed to 
accomplish the Nation's Objective. 

The significance of this lesson is 
the utter irrationality of national 
control in the hands of any class 
characterized by self-centered in- 
stincts, or that strength or skill or 
cunning should be dominating fac- 
tors in the social structure. 

Though none of these factors 
should dominate, each and all of 
these vital and necessary elements 
should have free scope for the so- 
cially effective outflow of its 
particular expression of life energy. 

Second only in significance to the 
acquiescence and co-operation of the 
united people is the method irre- 
sistibly forced upon the Nation by 
the logic and necessities of its stu- 
pendous War problem. 

First Real Nation. 

This most modern economic in- 
stitution, and the unified co-opera- 
tion of the united people, are the 
two outstanding lessons of the War 
for us. 

Taken together, they point sig- 
nificantly to the solution of our 
social problem — the lacking element 
which should and could consciously, 
deliberately, and rationally unify the 
basic instinctive urges into an har- 
monious direction of national effort 
and so produce a humanly efficient 
national organization — the first real 
Nation on earth! 

The lacking element? — the element 
which is adapted to assume the func- 
tion and position to be vacated by 
the obsolescent autocratic concept — 
arbitrary "control" — the element ca- 
pable of controlling without con- 
trol, of making Freedom effective. 
Democracy a living fact as well as 
a noble Ideal! 

In this, as in many other seem- 



ingly difficult problems of long 
standing, the solution has evaded us 
by reason of its very obviousness. 
Such a unifying factor has always 
existed in plain view — unutilized in 
.its proper function of Social Strain 
Equalizer. Indeed, this urge factor, 
more even than the Instincts — "to 
Live," "to Make," "to Take," "to 
Control" — is the most universal and 
most humanly characterizing trait of 
that most marvelous complex — Man. 

Desire to Know. 

I refer to Curiosity — curiosity ra- 
tionalized into Desire to Know. 

Desire to Know, while equally 
urgent for gratification, inherently 
lacks the undesirable and inappro- 
priate qualities which render the 
other human Instincts unsuitable as 
organizing and strain equalizing fac- 
tors in the social structure. Also it 
possesses qualities and attributes 
which make it peculiarly adapted to 
perform the rationally harmonizing 
function so irrationally assumed in 
all earlier social organizations under 
the guise of Forceful and Cunning 
Control. 

Desire to Know is as imperative 
in its demands as any of the self- 
centered motor Instincts — to live, to 
make, to take, to control — but it is 
impersonal; while It is as aggressive 
as other Instinctive Urges, charac- 
teristically its energies and activities 
are directed at Nature, not in ag- 
gression on human opponents; hence 
it engenders no human strife; and 
while it drives furiously, it drives 
none but its possessor — in the pur- 
suit of Knowledge. 

Desire to Know, while profoundly 
interested in all that pertains to 
Human Life and living — to eugenics 
and racial development — character- 
istically its possessor would risk his 
own life in the pursuit of Knowledge. 

Desire to Know, though urgently 
interested in Nature's Laws and in 
all that concerns the correct making 
and constructing of things, charac- 
teristically lacks desire to make or 
construct things, but seeks only sys- 
tematized concepts of Knowledge. 

Desire to Know, while deeply in- 
terested in all that pertains to the 
desirable things of the world and to 



TECHNOCRACY 



economic affairs, characteristically 
lacks the thievish impulse — the In- 
stinct to Take, to acquire physical 
possession: supremely acquisitive it 
craves only to acquire Knowledge. 

Desire to Know, while surpass- 
ingly Masterful, desires no mastery 
of Men; it craves instead, God-like 
insight, pre-vision, prophecy — power 
in the boundless realms of Knowl- 
edge. 

Leadership. 

Here then is an indomitable Urge 
lacking all the inappropriate qualities 
of the strife producing Autocratic 
Force-and-Fear Control motor con- 
cept of Social Organization, and 
possessed of all the unifying quali- 
ties of Social Leadership. 

A Human Society or Nation is 
sanely designed and rationally or- 
ganized on correct principles only 
when it has a Purpose, and (as in 
the case of a well considered ma- 
chine) only when full cognizance is 
taken of all its contributory elements, 
together with their essential func- 
tions and their proper co-ordination. 

A National Objective. 

A truly efficient National Organi- 
zation would facilitate (not suppress 
or prohibit) the expression of all 
inherent Instinctive Urges, rational- 
izing their outflowing life energy 
(by sane institutional conventions) 
into unification in a fully pre- 
determined National Purpose. 

In a crude but clearly percreptible 
manner the United States, durmg the 



War, gave suggestion of such an 
Ideal Social Arrangement. 

It had a defined and universally 
accepted purpose: 

Its Scientific (Desire to Know) 
Men and its Scientific Societies were 
(more or less) organized into a Uni- 
fying and Advisory Board to formu- 
late and. suggest methods and means 
for sane living and — to accomplish 
the predetermined purpose of the Na- 
tion. 

We have accomplished the object 
of the War: 

We have made the World safe for 
Democracy. 

Now, let us inaugurate a Demo- 
cracy — a Democracy with an object 
for its existence — a Democracy with 
a Purpose. 

By the peril to its life, the Nation 
has been shocked into momentary 
sanity. Let us while still rational, 
rationally take to heart the lessons 
which the War has taught at so 
staggering a cost: 

First: The need of a National 
Purpose; a purpose based upon peace 
and rational Human Development; 
a purpose as inspiring and as unify- 
ing as War for Democracy, and as 
high as our highest Ideals of Life. 

Second: The need of a Supreme 
National Covmcil of Scientists — 
supreme over all other National In- 
stitutions — to advise and instruct us 
how best to Live, and how most effi- 
ciently to realize our Individual and 
our National Purpose and Ideals. 

But, First and Last, a unifying Na-. 
tional Objective. 



Fernwald, Berkeley, December, 1918. 



IS WEALTH MORE PRECIOUS THAN HUMAN PERSONALITY? 
IS IT RATIONAL TO BASE HUMAN SOCIETY 
ON ANIMAL INSTINCTS? 



Technocracy 



PART II. 

National Industrial Management. 
Practical Suggestions for National Reconstruction. 

By William Henry Smyth 

NOTE: — After outlining and characterizing the great economic drifts 
in the national developments of the past, the author declares that during 
the period of war the United States has developed the new form in gov- 
ernment for which there is no precedent in human experience. He calls 
this "Technocracy" — the organizing, co-ordinating and directing through 
industrial management on a nation-wide scale of the scientific knowledge 
and practical skill of all the people who could contribute to the accomplish- 
ment of a great national purpose. Carry this new form of government into 
the days of peace and we will have industrial democracy — a new common- 
wealth. — Editor. 



Economic Drifts. 

The United States is obviously in 
social flux, in unstable economic equili- 
brium — in transition. Customs and 
usages which a few years ago received 
universal approval and legal sanction 
are now punished as crimes. Eco- 
nomic expedients which but yester- 
day were deemed irrational imagina- 
tions of Utopian visionaries are today 
accomplished facts. And in every di- 
rection immemorial methods and time 
honored social processes have lost 
their sacrosanctity. 

Like ocean streams enfolding in 
mass-flow all this whirling confusion 
of economic cross-currents, legal revo- 
lutions, and social agitations, there are 
to be observed certain super-control- 
ling drifts. 

Centralization of Government. 

Concentration of Wealth. 

Unification of Mechanical Industries. 

Force, Wealth, Industry. 

These great economic drifts indi- 
cate the mass resultant of myriad in- 
dividual activities expressing that pe- 
culiarly human quality which has made 
man the dominating animal factor on 
earth — unquenchable desire to con- 
trol — the Mastery Instinct. And what 
is more important in the present con- 
nection, these super-controlling social 
drifts also indicate the only directions 
possible for the social expression of 
this indomitable human urge: 



Direct control of men by force and 
fear — exemplified in Centralization of 
Government; indirect control of men 
by controlling their products — shown 
in Concentration of Wealth; mutual- 
ized control (i. e., utilization) of Na- 
ture — expressed in Unification of Me- 
chanistic Industries. 

Conflicting Ideals. 

In these various forms of social ag- 
gregations there are, broadly speak- 
ing, but three human types involved: 

The type characterized by aggres- 
sive physical strength; the type char- 
acterized by alert mental cunning; the 
type characterized by purposive skill. 

Of these the last — the purposive 
skill type — is significantly modern, 
brought into social prominence by 
that most stupendous social factor, 
experimental science, science which is 
the cfifcctive cause and basis of this 
era of invention — our industrial age. 

A triangular conflict of ideals of life 
and of social purpose has thus been 
inaugurated; a conflict which ac- 
counts for and is expressed in 
our "social unrest," "conflict of 
capital and labor," our "social 
problem" and "reconstruction." The 
strife for supremacy of social ideal 
and community purpose thus indicat- 
ed, is co-extensive with the human 
race; its most spectacular climax is 
the World War. And notwithstand- 
ing the many confusing forms and 
many-sided aspects which this world- 



TECHNOCRACY 



wide human struggle presents, it is, 
of course, at bottom the ages old con- 
test of Slavery and Liberty, Bondage 
and Freedom. 

The Golden Age? 

Our answer to this old but ever new 
problem will determine whether our 
industrial age will progress to a so- 
cial condition of individual freedom to 
which nothing in the past is compar- 
able, or whether our time shall be, to 
future generations, the Golden Age! — 
the highwater mark of human liberty 
— the age of a noble but a futile fight 
for a great ideal — Democracy. 

Club Economics. 

In simple cave-man times the boss- 
parent, quite naturally, made and ad- 
miaistered suitable primitive eco- 
nomics — with his persuasive club as a 
very practical emblem of authority. 
Under this raw-force regime the 
weaker "fagged" for the stronger; and 
the doings and havings of the "fags" 
made life more likeable for the force- 
ful. 

As the procreator of his subjects — 
and superior in strength during most 
of their lives — the "ownership" of 
them and theirs by the boss-parent 
was as "natural" as any other obvious 
fact; and chattel slavery as n,ecessary 
as parent ownership is self-evident. 

Mystery Economics. 

Then, Miracle-Fire-Maker and Ani- 
mal Breeder came along, and dis- 
turbed many of the time honored and 
well established customs — playing 
havoc generally with club-economics. 
By his wonder working magics cun- 
ning Miracle-worker put the fear of 
gods (more potent than physical 
strength) into the heart of simple old 
skull-cracker parent-god. So Miracle- 
worker waxed fat, and in his turn 
initiated and administered suitable 
economics — fire worship and mystery- 
economics, otherwise Theocracy. 

With theocracy came the greatest 
of all social revolutions; the dethron- 
ing of brute strength and the crown- 
ing of mental alertness — Cunning. 
This marked an epoch in human his- 
tory, in man's upward progress as 
a social animal. Also it marked the 
beginning of control of men (and their 
products) through man's instinctive 



fear of the unknown — the Rule of the 
Cunning. 

Force-Mystery-Economics. 

With varying fortunes force-eco- 
nornics and cunning-econoinics con- 
tended for supremacy till in compara- 
tively modern times autocracy was 
found an effective compromise. In this 
most practical arrangement, the (by 
that time conventionalized) parent- 
god received his authority from the 
All-powerful God-of-Magic. So was 
initiated modernized force-mystery- 
economics. And the human race has 
as yet found no more efficient means 
for the control of organized society 
than force-mystery-economics; meth- 
ods, means, and institutions which, but 
superficially modified since old Miracle 
worker's day, still function in our 
twentieth century (autocratic and 
democratic) customs, usages, conven- 
tions, and legalized economic systems. 

Working-by-proxy-Economics, 
In cave-man economics, the real 
function of the club or the purpose 
of Club-er was not to incapacitate 
Club-ee, but to induce the latter to do 
and supply the matters and things 
which otherwise would require greater 
and more constant expenditure of ef- 
fort on the part of the economist, than 
the semi-occasional swing of his skull- 
cracker. 

Old Skull-cracker's motives (though 
more crudely expressed) were the 
same as mine are, in the emplovment 
of my cook and my gardener, that is 
economy of effort on my part; other- 
wise working-by-proxy. 

But the club-econonTic-system was 
essentially wasteful and inefficient; its 
onerating expenses were outrageouslv 
high, notwithstandinsT the low cost of 
raw (human) material. Indeed, the 
system was apt to defeat its own ends, 
esoecially in those strenuous davs, 
when zeal commonly outran discre- 
tion. 

Doers and Suppliers. 

Thus mystery-coercion represents 
an enormous economic advance over 
raw physical force. Fear of unknown 
but awesome consequences for failure 
to do and supoly matters and thiners is 
fully as effective as the club — and be- 



TECHNOCRACY 



yond measure less wasteful of Doers 
and Supnliers. 

So it is quite natural and inevitable 
that crude force methods and pro- 
cesses of economic control should 
lose favor in competition with mystery 
economic systems. And long race ex- 
perience has proved that a judicious 
combination of club and mystery 
(otherwise force and cunning) makes 
for the highest degree of cfificiency in 
a Working-by-Proxy economic sys- 
tem. 

Proxy-Beneficiaries, 

Such economic systems, however, 
obviously imply direct or indirect 
slavery — ownership of the body or 
control of the mind of the proxy. And 
for the latter the mystery method is 
peculiarly adapted and most satisfac- 
tory. 

For self-evident reasons, control 
over another's mind is more effective 
and economical than property owner- 
ship of his body, taking into con- 
sideration the practical responsibility 
which the latter entails. So quite na- 
turally, direct ownership of Proxy by 
the economical Worker-by-proxy gives 
place to customs, usages, and conven- 
tions (economics), facilitating control 
over the results of Proxy's activities. 

Then, too, complex division of labor 
and specialization render chattel slav- 
ery impractical, indeed unworkable, in 
a socictv highly organized for pro- 
ductive industry. So an ideal work- 
ing-bv-proxy economic svstem would 
permit complete physical liberty to do 
and to make, while arranging appro- 
priate usagps, customs, and laws which 
automatically transfer ownership of 
the matters and things done and made, 
from the doers and makers to the 
proxy-ben eficiaries. 

Economic Science? 

The difference between modern and 
primordial economics is not in idea or 
purpose, but only in added obscurity 
of method and in greater complexity 
of detail. Incidentally, also, it has be- 
come evident that "economics" is not 
a "science" in any proper sense, but 
a variable system of community us- 
ages intended to facilitate the pre- 
dominating social activities. And, 
hence, to be workable an "economic 
system" must be in keeping with the 



activities which characterize the times. 
In cave-man times, the boss-parent 
and his club-men had to make cave- 
economics. A system initiated by the 
"fags" would have been obviously un- 
workable. The priesthood had to 
initiate and administer theocratic eco- 
nomics. And so on, through the 
various changes in social organization: 
Those whose activities characterize 
the times must initiate and administer 
its economics. 

Economic Experiments. 

Raw force has been relegated to 
the economic backwoods — to the 
racially infantile tribes of darkest 
Africa, and to the social usages of 
our anachronistic "criminal elements," 
the yegg, the thug, the gun-fighter, 
the strong-arm gangs of the under- 
world of modern organized societv. 

Theocracy, with its crude cunning, 
its childish terrors and its dazzling 
promises of future (super-mundane) 
rewards, has practically vanished as a 
recognized dominant social factor — a 
fading shadow of ancient greatness. 

Autocracy, that cunning combination 
of force and fear economics, has just 
now been dumped into the scrap-heap 
of out-worn social expedients, at the 
cost of the most atrocious and blood- 
iest of all wars, and the flower of the 
World's Manhood. 

Plutocracy, with its autocratic capi- 
talistic economics (while weakened 
and shaken bv the shocks and stresses 
of the World War) is still a virile 
contestant for the throne of World 
Dominion. 

Strength, Skill, Cunning. 

Economics efficient for autocracy 
must necessarily differ from eco- 
nomics appropriate to theocracy; and 
these would differ from economics 
suitable for plutocracv; and these 
again would differ still more from 
economics appropriate to and efficient 
for Industrial Democracy. In brief: 
Force-economics, Cunning-economics, 
and Skill-economics must necessarily 
differ as widely as the essential dif- 
ferences between the basic qualities. 
Strength, Cunning, Skill. 

Hence any attempt to organize or 
"re-construct" a social aggregation 
with these Ihree basic human traits 
as contemporary economic bases 



10 



TECHNOCRACY 



means simply continual social warfare; 
a war which, sooner or later, must be 
decided by victory for the Strong, the 
Cunning, or the Skilled — unless hum.an 
ingenuity can devise a form of society 
which will permit and facilitate the 
full, unified, and socially useful expres- 
sion of these three irrepressible forms 
of life energy. 

Mechanized Industry. 

Thus we return to the three great 
social drifts: 

Centralization of Government; 

Concentration of Wealth; 

Unification of Mechanistic Indus- 
tries.. 

Of the first two little need be said, 
for they are familiar racial experi- 
ences. But the last — the mechanizing 
of life — is quite otherwise; hence it is, 
if for no other reason, the most sig- 
nificant factor to be taken into account 
in the social problems with which we 
are now confronted — our problem of 
economic reconstruction. 

And, truly, our modern mechaniza- 
tion of human life is a most dubious 
social experiment — a danger-fraught 
development — a dynamitic racial ad- 
venture. 

Modern Science. 

Back of the tnechanizing of human 
functioning is that greatest of all mod- 
ern inarvels — experimental science. 

Science has brought about a pro- 
found revolution in our mental atti- 
tude toward life, and in our methods 
of dealing with nature. It has swept 
into the discard practically all our pre- 
vious notions regarding ourselves and 
our relations to the laws of nature — 
to Universal Reality. It has, at the 
same time, debased man's pride in the 



dust of humilit}', and glorified intelli- 
gence and human worth to God-like 
heights. 

Science is, of course, the effective 
cause of our present mechanistic de- 
velopment — with all its physical bene- 
fits and all its spiritual horrors; for 
science knows neither morals nor eth- 
ics, and is equally potent for social 
"bad" as for social "good." 

Science works just as effectively in 
criminal hands as in thos,^ of a saint. 
It is an impersonal, ethically neutral 
force and factor so potent that — even 
in the chaotic condition in which it 
now exists — it has brought about a 
world revolution in man's mental out- 
look and his physical activities, both 
individually and collectively. Indeed 
it has shown to man a new Heaven, 
a new Earth, and a new Hell. 

Our social Heaven w^e have yet to 
construct, but the World War is suf- 
ficientlv impressive proof of w'hat 
social Hell can be wrought by Science 
in the hands of self-interest. 

Past and Present. 

As the result of modern science, 
the present time is w'ithout precedent, 
hence no valid analogy exists or can 
be imagined between an economic 
system appropriate to our science- 
taught mechanistic age and earlier 
econoinic systems suitable to condi- 
tions of life, the warp, woof, and pat- 
tern of which were Mj^stery, Magic, 
Chance. 

That no helpful comparison can be 
made between the past and the pres- 
ent would be completely true, were 
it not that our science teachings affect 
but the thinnest superficial layer of 
our conscious thinking, while the 



There is a serenity, a long view on the part of science, which seems 
to be of no age, but to carry human thought along from generation to 
generation, freed from the elements of passion. Every just mind must 
condemn those who so debase the studies of men in science as to 
use them against humanity and, therefore, it is part of your task and of 
ours to reclaim science from this disgrace, to show that she is devoted to 
the advancement and interest in humanity and not to its embarrass- 
ment and destruction. The spirit of science is a spirit of seeking after 
truth so far as the truth is ready to be applied to human circum- 
stances. 

From President Wilson's address before the Academy of Lincci in 
Rome. 



TECHNOCRACY 



11 



fabric of our thought processes, our 
familiar customs, our current usages, 
our economic institutions remain prac- 
tically unchanged — our racial heritage. 
But, even so, the unceasing con- 
flict of past and present, of slavery 
and freedom, of bondage and liberty, 
of error and truth, goes ever on and 
on — a blood soaked path; a path of 
misery, strife and disappointment, 
though hopefully ever upward toward 
our ideal — Industrial Democracy with 
personal freedom for Self-realization. 

Mental Inertia. 

Without a concurrent change of 
economic institutions appropriate to 
the amazingly rapid psychical devel- 
opment and refinement of our modern 
ideals— brought about by the advent 
of science — the realization of these 
ideals will be impossible. And sorrow- 
fullj' we recognize that man's instinc- 
tive resistance to change of old estab- 
lished modes of thought — howsoever 
irrational — makes progress in this di- 
rection seem almost hopeless. 

Familiar Fallacies. 

Most reluctantly are familiar fal- 
lacies relinquished, indeed, we hang 
on to them with irrational tenacity 
ages after their unworkable character 
has time and again been tragically 
demonstrated. 

As in our bodily functions and skele- 
tal frame there still persist the char- 
acteristics of our Saurian primordial 
ancestry, so ancient modes of thought 
live unnoted in our present day think- 
ing processes; and our social institu- 
tions represent the seemingly out- 
grown superstitions constituting 
man's mental heredity during every 
past age since the infancy of the 
human race. 

"Gott mit uns." 

Medievalism characterizes our sa- 
cred and secular institutions and 
energizes our customary • actions. 
Demonology is practically as prev- 
alent as in the past; unnoted in 
ourselves but easily perceived in the 
"Gott mit uns" attitude of the 
Kaiser. 

We pray for health, heedless of 
nature's laws; we pray for long life 
while disregarding the simple rules 
of right living; we beseech forgive- 



ness of "sin" while making sin 
profitable by deliberate legal enact- 
ment. In a world filled to over- 
flowing with all good and humanly 
desirable things to be had for the 
striving, we econoinically steal from 
our industrious neighbors; like 
paupers we beg "God" for vicari- 
ously earned joys, for unearned 
prosperity, and for all other forms of 
undeserved "good fortune;" and like 
pert children we urge silly advice 
on our man-made Providence, for 
the conduct of common human af- 
faiis, which we are too lazy, too 
stupid, too self-indulgent to bring to 
desired outcome by our own effort. 

The God of Chance. 

Important departments of life and 
the distribution of the products of 
industry — trade, speculation, oppor- 
tunity, recreation — involve large ele- 
ments of "luck," for by grotesquely 
solemn "laws" the issues are left 
to the "God of Chance." Just pre- 
cisely as in the old days when mo- 
mentous matters were settled by the 
entrails of sacrificial animals. 

The killing of President McKinlej 
by a madman "caused" the depre- 
ciation in the value of stocks to the 
extent of thousands of millions of 
dollars; the San Francisco calamity 
— which rendered half a million hu- 
man beings homeless — "made" for- 
tunes for the owners of and specu- 
lators in suburban property; the 
Titanic disaster threw a hundred 
millions of wealth (others' products', 
into the hands of a school-boy, and 
with it control over the lives ol 
thousands of human beings; and eveB 
the supreme tragedy of a World 
at War is the prolific "cause" of 
transforming hundreds of mediocre 
men into multi-millionaires — and 
hence into powerful social factors. 

Diabolism. 

All this represents kindergarten 
thinking, primitive and childish _ as 
nursery prattle of prixies and fairies, 
Aladin's lamp, and all the other 
forms of Old World superstition and 
diabolism, worthy only of the in- 
fancy of the race. 

Were it not that these grotes- 
queries characterize our "economic 



12 



TECHNOCRACY 



and finance system" and our solemn 
Professors soberly teach them, they 
would be utterly incredible in this 
Age of Science and Mechanics. 

But, as already indicated, our "eco- 
nomics and finance" are merely sur- 
vivals from pre-science times; an in- 
heritance from the days of wizardry 
and witchcraft, mystery and magic. 

Our quaint "economics" and queer 
"finance" are as anachronistic, as 
inconsistent, and as ineffective in this 
Mechanical Age of Industrialism, as 
astrology would be in an astrono- 
mical observatory, alchemy in a 
chemical laboratory or "perpetual mo- 
tion" in a machine shop. 

Scientific Foresight. 

Imagination based on science en- 
ables us to foresee the oak in the 
acorn — coming events latent in pres- 
ent happenings. But so strong is 
custom, so firm is the grip of the 
past, so compelling is the obses- 
sion of ancient superstitions, that — 
with all our lately acquired capa- 
bility for rational scientific thinking 
— only the tragedy of the accom- 
plished fact has sufficient power to 
jolt our sluggard wits into momen- 
tary activity. 

Ten, fifteen, yes, twenty-five years 
ago, it required no more intelligence 
to foresee the present war than to 
anticipate a crop in the Fall from 
seed sown in the Spring. 

Even less scientific imagination is 
now needed to foretell a condition 
of social disintegration, one more wide- 
spread and disastrous than the War, 
as the logical and inevitable outcome 
of our irrational and antiquated so- 
cial conventions — our "economic and 
financial system." 

Taking Instinct. 

If taking — by force or diverting by 
cunning, in whole or in part — the 
product of another's effort, without 
adequate equitable return, be accept- 
ed as a valid social principle of 
action between individuals, it must 
be equally good and proper as be- 
tween social groups, as between na- 
tions. 

But however disguised in smooth 
sounding phrases — the "chances of 
business," the "profits of trade," 
the "opportunity of others' misfor- 



tune," the "prize of the victor," the 
"fortunes of war," the "right of 
might" — taking expresses the par- 
asitic and predatory instincts. And, 
called by whatsoever name or how- 
soever disguised, taking others' mak- 
ings by force, or diverting others' 
products by stealthy cunning, inevit- 
ably involves unending strife; strife 
within the group and recurring wars 
of nations — strife to settle the rela- 
tive strength or cunning as between 
individuals, and wars to determine 
the relative might of nations. 

Predatory Economics. 

Our "economic system" is essen- 
tially autocratic in means, in method, 
in objective. Being a left-over from 
an Age of Predatory Autocracy, 
necessarily its ideals are materialis- 
tic — its motor instinct and urge im- 
pulse being self-centered "greed and 
grab." Naturally its means are force 
and cunning and its methods are 
ruthless, for its object is power — 
power, irresponsible and absolute. 

Our Modern Ideals. 

If we are to remain true to our 
ideals — ideals which the flame of war 
has illumined to our normally pur- 
blind spiritual insight — our course 
is determined. We have no choice 
but to choose freedom: pioneer a 
virgin trail, slash a course unblazed 
by history, uncharted in race experi- 
ence — a courage testing National Ad- 
venture. 

The race has never before been 
confronted with a situation in any 
way analogous to the one in which 
we now find ourselves, nor a prob- 
lem the like of that which we are 
now compelled to solve; yes, and 
solve correctly, if we would avoid 
distintegration into social chaos — 
overwhelmed by a science-made 
Frankenstein. 

Science Is Dynamitic! 

Science has, however, put into our 
hands an instrumentality of such 
immeasurable potency, that, used 
with intelligent courage, we may con- 
quer all our difficulties, surmount all 
our social obstructions. 

But, Science left to chance, or in 
the hands of unintelligent self-interest. 



TECHNOCRACY 



13 



the chances are it will work untold 
social calamity. 

There are so many roads to ,^o 
wrong, and only one way to go ri.^lu. 

To leave a force and factor of 
such supreme social significance and 
potentiality as Science in its prcsi-nt 
condition — socially uncontrolled and 
unorganized for the commonweal — 
is more crassly unintelligent than to 
permit fused and capped dynamite to 
be scattered around promiscuously, 
to the chances of any carelessly or 
maliciously applied spark. 

(A striking and significant parallel- 
ism to the thought here expressed 
was subsequently voiced by Presi- 
dent Wilson in one of his speeches 
at the Versailles Peace Conference: 

"Is it not a startling circumstance, 
for one thing, that the quiet studies 
of inen in laboratories, that the 
thoughtful developments which have 
taken place in quiet lecture rooms, 
have now been turned to the de- 
struction of civilization? 

"The enemy whom we have just 
overcome had at his scats of learning 
some of the principal centers of 
scientific study and discovery, and he 
used them in order to make de- 
struction sudden and complete; and 
only the watchful, continuous co-op- 
eration of men can see to it that 
science as well as armed men are 
kept within the harness of civiliza- 
tion.") 

Democracy. 

In the rough. Democracy is the 
rule of the mob, the rule of the 
masses, the rule of the majority — the 
rule of un-intelligence. But even so, 
it is better than any form of govern- 
mental control based upon self-inter- 
'cst — not excepting "Beneficent Autoc- 
racy." 

Humanly bad and socially ineffi- 
cient as it may be, and has been. De- 
mocracy alone encloses and fosters 
the living germ of freedom — self- gov- 
ernment. 

But, during the scant two years that 
we were at war, no ordinary or ac- 
cepted definition of Democracy could 
make that term descriptive of the 
United States; indeed, under the life 
threatening stress of a World War, 
our great but chaotic nation — in self- 



preservation — ceased to be a Democ- 
racy! 

Transformation. 

In that remarkable war transfor- 
mation, we certainly did not become 
an Autocracy; even less so a Plutoc- 
racy; and least of all a Theocracy. In 
fact, during this thrillingly interesting 
time, the United States developed into 
a form of "Government" for which 
there is no precedent in human ex- 
perience. 

National Industrial Management 
— Technocracy. 

The characterizing peculiarity which 
rendered our great country unique — 
during this period of national stress — 
and not only unique but uniquely ir- 
resistible, was the fact that we ra- 
tionally organized our National Indus- 
trial Management. We became, for 
the time being, a real Industrial Na- 
tion. 

This we did by organizing and co- 
ordinating the Scientific Knowdedge, 
the Technical Talent, the Practi- 
cal wSkill and the Man Power of the 
entire Community: focusing them in 
the National Government, and apply- 
ing this Unified National Force to the 
accomplishment of a Unified National 
Purpose. 

For this unique experiment in ra- 
tionalized Industrial Democracy I 
have coined the term "Technocracy." 

It was but an experiment — a forced 
one — to ineet an exceptionally serious 
emergency; and like most other ex- 
perimental devices, it doubtless was 
far from perfect in many ways and 
details. Still, as it seems to me, it 
presented an important suggestion, the 
germ of a novel and significant idea — 
a pioneer idea in the ancient art of 
government. 

Dog-Eat-Dog. 

Until appropriate economic institu- 
tions and instrumentalities are avail- 
able, humanly effective Industrial De- 
mocracy must remain' an unrealizable 
ideal, a theory unattainable as a work- 
a-day principle of social life, and for 
the efficient distribution of the pro- 
ducts of toil, upon which human life 
rests. 

The practical working out of our 
present efforts in this direction, has so 



14 



TECHNOCRACY 



far only resulted in a frenzied scram- 
ble for wealth, place, power — a brut- 
ish-instinct-scramble, in which greed, 
cunning, and lust for human mastery 
are the urges; "dog-eat-dog" the 
"practical" ideal; and mystery, 
medievalism, law-loadcd-dice and 
chuck-a-luck instrumentalities the con- 
trolling factors. 

The Greedless Scientist. 

In this weird social (?) conglomera- 
tion how incongruous seems — and, in- 
deed, is — the greedless scientist, who 
seeks but to learn, to comprehend, and 
to co-ordinate the laws of nature; and 
who cares naught for human mastery. 
In this frenzied scramble for science- 
created wealth what earthly chance 
has its real creator — the scientist? 

Practically none! 

None, unless he sells himself into 
virtual slavery; unless he debauches 
his truth-seeking to the interest of 
those who — more "practical" — devote 
their energy and cunning to the "prac- 
tical" enterprise of gaining power by 
securing control of wealth. And yet, 
the United States is characteristically 
a nation of technologists — scientists, 
inventors, workers in and utilizers of 
the raw materials and the forces of 
nature. Not only are we instinctively 
mechanistic, but we are — by heritage, 
by force of circumstance, and by tra- 
dition — born lovers of personal free- 
dom. Freedom is our ideal — seli- 
government. 

Prior to the War, our de-humaniz- 
ing ideal was Mechanistic Efficiency, 
under its soul-searching stress was 
born a Humanly Effective Nation. 

Our Costly Lesson. 

With all these considerations before 
us, and our fleeting glance at the pos- 
sibilities of socially unified skill, tech- 
nology, and science, how worse than 
foolish to revert to our pre-War "dog- 
eat-dog" practices and practical (?) 
ideals. 

Instead of so doing, would it not 
be well to take to heart the lessons 
forced upon us at so stupendous a 
cost of life and human misery? 

Would it not be wise statesmanship 
to experiment further on the lines of 
direction into which we were forced 
by the compulsions and stresses of 
War? 



Reconstruction — With a National 
Objective. 

The War is over — won! 

We are now facing the — in reality — 
more stupendous problems of social 
reconstruction. 

For the War, we enlisted, conscript- 
ed, commandeered all our men who by 
natural aptitude, and by personal in- 
clination, were adapted to the require- 
ments of war. We organized and co- 
ordinated them for the intended pur- 
pose; we trained and exercised their 
bodies and their minds to meet known 
and unknown trials; we energized 
their loyalty to the Flag — the Com- 
monweal; we stirred their personal de- 
votion to the Nation's ideals; we en- 
thused their wills to the accomplish- 
ment of the unified Will of the Nation 
— the National Objective. 

Rationalized Industrial Democracy. 

No need is there to speak of the 
result of this Unification of National 
Spirit and National Purpose— the War 
is over; won! — gloriously won! 

As we enlisted all those peculiarly 
adapted to the destructive functions 
of War, let us now systematically 
unify those peculiarly adapted to the 
constructive functions of Peace — our 
scientists, our technologists, our in- 
ventors, indeed, all who by natural 
aptitude and personal inclination are 
specially fitted to deal with the social 
and constructive problems of peaceful 
industr}'; nationally unify them and 
their accomplishments for the Com- 
monweal. 

Let us organize our scientists, 
our technologists, our exceptionally 
skilled; let us commandeer, conscript, 
enlist, their loyalty, their devotion, 
their enthusiasm, their intelligence, 
their interest, their talents, their ac- 
complishments for the purposes oi 
Peace and the realization of a Noble 
National Purpose. 

Let us rationalize our Industrial De< 
mocracy ! 

Public Service First. 

We are up against the problem of 
national reconstruction; let us not 
tinker v."Ith futile details— let us na- 
tionally Ke-construct. 

Such a national co-ordination oi 
Science and Technology, as is here 
suggested, would produce and consti- 



TECHNOCRACY 



15 



tute a living and Social life-giving Na- 
tional Reservoir of Science — practical 
and theoretical; a Technical Army de- 
voted to Peace and Construction. 

It would constitute a National Army, 
from which alone Private Interests 
could draw their needed scientific and 
technical personnel; personnel whose 
loyalty is primarily to the Common- 
weal — the Nation; the Nation of which 
they are honored Public Servants. 

This is the exact reverse of our pres- 
ent unpatriotic, un-democratic order 
and organization. Yet, such an intim- 
ate, but subsidiary, relation to public 
service, as is suggested, would liberate 
not hamper individual energy and free- 
dom of private enterprise, for it would 
permit the free expression of self- 
interest unified in the commonweal. 
Also it would, without conflict, fa- 
cilitate the full and socially useful out- 
flow of the three vigorous forms of 
life energy — Strength, Skill, Cunning. 

Industrial Apex. 

From this co-ordinated Army of 
Science, Technology, and Skill should 
be selected (by a process of realized 
capability and recognized social worth) 
a representative and comprehensive 
National Council of Scientists as Man- 
aging Directors — our Supreme Social 
Institution. 



This National Council should be the 
apex of the Nation's Industrial Man- 
agement. It should constitute the 
Leadership of our thus rationalized 
Industrial Democrac3\ 

Purpose. 

But this reconstruction — revolu- 
tionary as it doubtless will appear to 
many — is only preparation for our 
National Task. 

It would, indeed, make of us an or- 
ganized human aggregation — a unified 
social machine, capable of intelligent 
self-conscious national life; and then 
comes the question: 

For what worthy purpose have we 
constructed this huge highly organized 
Human Instrumentality? 

This problem a Nation — no less 
than an individual— unescapably faces, 
the instant it has become really self- 
determining. 

It is the Nation's first, its final, its 
only problem — the final problem of 
human existence. 

And this all-important matter, every 
Nation (like every individual) must 
settle for itself — settle between itself 
and Universal Rationality: The ob- 
ject of the Nation's being; its con- 
scious rational purpose — its National 
Objective. 



Fernwald, Berkelej% January, 1919. 



SHOULD THE DESTINY OF THE NATION 
BE LEFT TO CHANCE? 



Technocracy 

PART III. 

Ways and Means 
To Gain Industrial Democracy. 



By William Henry Smyth 

NOTE: — In the two preceding essays Mr. Smyth forecasts a new form 
of government that he calls "Technocracy"— National Industrial Man- 
agement. This article discusses ways and means to develop, guide and di- 
rect purposive industrial democracy and so usher in a new commonwealth. 

The author suggests three practical thoughts for economic reconstruc- 
tion: That permitting chance to influence our lives and conditions means 
ignorance. That the flow of time is not reversible— the future cannot help 
the present. That cause and effect, not whim, is the law in nature's pro- 
cesses. — Editor. 



Social Structures. 

Democracy and Autocracy are the 
antitheses of social organization and 
express opposite underlying principles 
of human interaction. 

The structural details of any human 
contrivance — whether Mechanical or 
Sociological — must be in keeping with 
its underlying idea. Change in prin- 
ciple necessarily entails functional re- 
organization — reconstruction. 

Hence, ways and means that have 
proved effective for autocracy, or that 
long usage has shaped to facilitate 
its aims and outcomes, must needs be 
not only unworkable in, but subversive 
of, democracy. So it will be helpful 
in our quest to keep constantly and 
clearly in mind the differences be- 
tween these mutually exclusive no- 
tions of Government. 

Autocracy. 

Probably the most radical difference 
between these two forms of social 
structures is the assumed sources from 
which each gets its authority. 

Autocracy derives its powers from 
"God." This assumption pre-supposes 
inherent social distinctions between 
individuals — occult privileges con- 
ferred upon some to control the acts 
of others. But effectively to control 
acts makes requisite control of 
thoughts, for consecutive thought 
necessarily precedes purposive action. 

Thus Autocracy implies a "God- 
given" right of censorship over other 
men's physical and mental function- 
ing. Hence, it also pre-supposes the 



non-neutrality of Nature — cosmic- 
favoritism; for clearly nature's "God" 
could not look with favor upon dis- 
obedience or lack of submission to the 
mandates of His authorized agents. 

A social organization framed upon 
this general idea implies constructive 
details, i. e., customs, laws, institutions 
— economics — comprising: 

1. A Supreme Control element, de- 
riving its authority from and respon- 
sible only to a super-mundane source. 

2. Social instrumentalities to en- 
force obedience — physically coerce hu- 
man actions, and super-naturally con- 
trol men's thoughts. 

3. A descending series of conferred 
authority starting with the "God-ap- 
pointed Ruler" and ending with the 
popular "masses" void of rights. 

Thus the measure of efficiency in 
this social system is the absoluteness 
of control — completeness of en- 
forced obedience in act and subservi- 
ence in thought to the "God-inspired 
will" of the Autocrat and his Agents. 
Democracy. 

Democracy derives its authority 
from Man. This pre-supposes general 
intelligence sufficient at least for self- 
conscious Individual wants and Mass 
purposes, with freedom for their pur- 
suit; thus it assumes super-mundane 
non-interference with human wants 
and purposes, and a rational Cosmic 
Order corresponding or co-ordinated 
to human intelligence in suchwisc as 
to be knowable and responsive there- 
to. • 

A social system based upon this gen- 



TECHNOCRACY 



17 



eral idea implies constructive details 
in consonance with: 

1. The neutrality of nature. 

2. Inherent individual rights flowing 
from the facts of rational human ex- 
istence. 

3. Equalit}- of individual rights. 
Thus the measure of efficiency in a 

Democracy is to be gaged by the com- 
pleteness of individual freedom of 
thought and liberty of action in rela- 
tion to each other and of access to 
nature's stores, resources and forces — - 
freedom and liberty being based upon 
rationality as determined by work- 
ability in the production of general 
human happiness, prosperity and op- 
portunity for self-development. 

Autocracy is based upon the idea 
of the essential manship (i. e. man- 
likeness) of "God" and the inher- 
ent unrighteousness — irrationality — of 
Man. 

Democracy is based upon the idea 
of the essential God-ship (i. e. God- 
likeness) of Man and the inherent 
righteousness — rationality — of the Uni- 
verse. 

Thus we get a clear concept of our 
chosen social Ideal, and from it indi- 
cations as to the character of means 
appropriate to or discordant therewith. 
In other words we have on broad lines, 
bases for rational economic conven- 
tions, adapted to make effective a so- 
cial system on the basic principles of 
Democracy. 

Limitations. 

Neitlicr by mutual agreement, nor 
by legal enactment, nor constitutional 
provision, nor even as a concession 
to ancient custom and universal con- 
sent may we make two units and two 
units constitute five units — being con- 
trary to the facts of nature. For pre- 
cisely the same reasons we cannot (by 
any or all of these social expedients) 
successfully adopt or retain economic 
devices at variance with the essential 
principles of Democracy. 

Industrial Democracy — Purpose. 

Autocracy and Democracy arc both 
merely forms of human organization, 
group contrivances — social machines — 
built on different basic ideas or prin- 
ciples; machines to accomplish some- 
thing. 



A Nation (no less than an individ- 
ual) that would build (or "recon- 
struct") without first clearly deter- 
mining the purpose of the proposed 
structure, would be indulging in 
a foolish and futile waste of en- 
ergy. But what our national purpose 
is, is quite apart from the present in- 
quiry. And, indeed, it is not the prov- 
ince of an individual, but of consensus 
to determine the ultimate National Ob- 
jective. 

Industrial Democracy. 

The people of the United States 
have, however, agreed and decided 
upon the idea of the National Or- 
ganization and its proximate charac- 
ter — Industrial Democracy. Or 
perhaps this outcome represents the 
resultant of choice and circumstance. 
Be that as it may, we are now con- 
sciously launched on a career of 
mechanistic Industrial Democracy; 
and the aim of the present inquiry 
is to investigate the functional con- 
sistency (appropriateness) of the 
working parts to the accepted prin- 
ciple of the National Social Machine. 

Neutral Nature. 

The greatest and most consequence- 
breeding thought that has ever found 
lodgement in the human mind is the 
idea that: Nature is neutral toward 
Man and in regard to all Human con- 
cerns. 

The greatest and most conse- 
quential human discovery is: The 
Orderliness — rationality — of Nature. 

These two concepts are the mar- 
velously fruitful germs from which 
all modern Science has developed. 
And, as exact science — based upon 
experimental proof — owes its con- 
tinued development to machines of 
precision; it may with ultimate sig- 
nificance be said that our idea and 
Ideal of Human Liberty, self-govern- 
ment, as we today conceive it, is 
one of the many wonderful products 
of the machine shop — our Mechan- 
istic Industrialism. 

Motor Impulse of Autocracy. 

Man's soul is free, hence Rational 
Liberty is his social motor impulse. 

Clearly, with an anthropomorphic 
"God" interested in human wants, 
wishes, purposes, and projects, and 



18 



TECHNOCRACY 



with unlimited power and inclination 
to meddle in human concerns, to 
help or hinder, to make or mar them; 
human "freedom of thought" would 
be futile, and human "liberty of ac- 
tion" a farce. 

We have seen that the motor im- 
pulse of Autocracy is super-mundane 
in origin; its initiative is super- 
human; its ineans are mysterious 
occult powers derived from "above"; 
that privilege maintained by ruthless 
force and cunning is an essential 
element; and power absolute and 
humanly irresponsible is its objec- 
tive. 

These factors therefore present 
some criteria wherewith to gauge 
the validity of present economic con- 
ventions; also to test their appropri- 
ateness in a Democracy, the basis of 
which is human experience energized 
by individual human initiative; like- 
wise to measure their probable worth 
in a society in which the powers 
to do, and the opportunity to be, 
are derived from the consensus of 
free and equal human wills; wills 
subject to none, but co-operating to 
facilitate individual and mutual pur- 
poses — purposes socially unified in 
the purposive National Will. 

Nature Non-Ethical. 

In the light of Modern Science, 
human experience shows that Na- 
ture's dealings with Man carry no 
more moral or ethical significance 
than in the problems of Practical 
Mechanics. Scientifically enlightened 
experience teaches that Humanity 
alone is ethical or takes account 
of motives: 

Impartially the sun warms and 
scorches, blesses or blasts; brings 
famine and plenty, life and death. 
The sea, the wind, earthquake and 
torrent, and all the forces of Nature 
build and destroy, with utter disre- 
gard to Man or his handiworks, his 
hopes or his faiths, his motives or 
his morals. The wondrous mechan- 
ism of Creative Evolution performs its 
myriad functions no less oblivious to 
Man's existence than are the ponder- 
ous machines of Man's own devising. 
Nature, like them, fosters or over- 
whelms with heedless indifference; 
ruthless, pitiless, appalling to ignor- 
ance, error, and fear; but helpful, in- 



dulgent, obedient to knowledge, 
intelligence and courage; neither 
kind nor cruel, nor good, nor bad — 
impersonal. 

Failure. 

In the past, with childlike faith we 
have relied for support and guidance 
in human afifairs upon the assumed 
beneficence of occult Powers. Upon 
this basis, Autocracy is the only con- 
ceivable form of social organization. 

Yet, the autocratic idea and Ideal 
has proven, (in the opinion of many), 
to be a disastrous failure under mod- 
ern conditions; and we in the United 
States have decided to try its 
antithesis — Democracy. 

But while discarding the old for 
the new Ideal, we have, most illog- 
ically, retained — substantially un- 
changed — the eflfective conventions, 
the ways and nieans, of the old 
order. 

And now, with modern Science and 
Mechanics — hindered and hampered 
at all points by our futile and in- 
appropriate "Economic System" — we 
are fighting for National life and 
Democracy against efiiciently or- 
ganized Autocracy. Not alone the 
Autocracy of organized military force 
but also the Autocracy of systein- 
atized and unified financial Cunning. 

Thus the urgent need for scientific 
reconstruction of our whole social 
system is multiplied manyfold, if we 
are to rectify our past sins against 
reason and retrieve our pitiful social 
failure. 

Modern Dependence on Machinery. 

The life of the ordinary modern 
man differs from that of all previous 
times in his peculiar dependence upon 
complicated machinery — machinery 
over which he exercises no personal 
control. The manifold activities 
which in past times depended upon 
individual muscular effort are now 
performed by prime movers and 
power driven machines, so that the 
individual man's work and effort is 
unmeaning and useless apart from 
these instrumentalities of life and 
production. 

Thus the United States is one huge 
mechanistic industrial workshop.. 

The organization of these com- 
plex, specialized, power-driven mech- 



TECHNOCRACY 



19 



anisms and the sources of power and 
of the raw materials with and upon 
which they operate, together with 
the distribution of the output, are 
the functions of Scientific and Tech- 
nical Industrial Management. 

There should be, it would seem, 
no room or occasion in such an ar- 
rangement, for chance, mystery or 
magic. 

Old Customs. 

That the average individual prefers 
old customs to new, helps to account 
for much that is strange in present 
conditions; but it fails to explain 
completely how it happens that 
occultism has been wholly banished 
from the I^Iachine Shop — the Social 
Producing F_,lement — and remains so 
conspicuously interwoven in out 
"Economics" — the Social Distributive 
Element. 

It would seem that we are com- 
pelled to assume that our deep seated 
human instinct of self-interest is the 
controlling factor in maintaining this 
incongruous combination of Science 
and Occultism. 

It would seem that the cunning 
acquisitive instinct of certain excep- 
tionally alert minded men in the com- 
munity — taking advantage of the 
normal preference of the average man 
for old ways and customs, and his 
preoccupation in his favorite work- 
ings and doings — is employing these 
ancient and familiar usages to befog 
and obscure the stealthy diversion of 
an undue proportion of the Commun- 
ity Product. 

If this be so, it should be interest- 
ing to glance at the ways and means, 
the prestidigitatorial bag-o-tricks by 
which it is accomplished. Later we 
will scrutinize them more closely and 
in greater detail. 

Money and Credit. 

The bases of Mechanics in all its 
simple and complex expressions are 
two commonplace elements — the 
Wedge and the Lever; the bases of 
our Economic and Financial System 
in all its curious " manifestations are 
also two commonplace elements — 
"Money" and "Credit." 

Here the similarity ends. 

There is not on ordinary fourteen- 
year-old school boy in the United 



States but who knows and intelli- 
gently uses the wedge and lever; and 
there does not exist a Mechanical 
Expert who could reasonably ques- 
tion the practical accuracy of the 
boy's knowledge regarding these 
elements of mechanics. 

Under our present economic us- 
ages, customs and laws, each one of 
us — man, woman and child — is com- 
pelled, willy-nilly, to use daily and 
hourly some form of "money" and 
"credit"; and there is not in the world 
a man who understands either of 
these economic elements, as the 
boy knows the wedge and lever. 
Nor is there an Economic Specialist 
or Financial Expert whose attempted 
explanation of either "money" or 
"credit" (or the functions of either) 
whose supposed elucidation would 
not be ridiculed and controverted by 
a multitude of Economic and Mone- 
tary Experts of equal or greater au- 
thority. 

The average man of affairs — Law- 
3'er, Doctor, Editor, Tradesman, Mer- 
chant or Mechanic — freely admits his 
incapacity to understand the "mys- 
teries of finance," and frankly says: 
"I don't know a damn thing about 
it." Even Bankers and Brokers, 
Financiers and Economists, whose 
business it is to deal in and mani- 
pulate these most remarkable com- 
modities, will quite frequently make 
the same honest confession of ignor- 
ance. Indeed, the subject is common 
stock in the jokesmith's workshop. 

Mystery, Magic — Failure. 
In no other department of human 
interest is so much mystery, confu- 
sion and controversy regarding the 
basic "facts" and assumptions, except 
possibly institutional religion — which, 
avowedly, rests upon the miraculous 
and supernatural. Indeed, the paral- 
lelism between these two ancient ac- 
tivities is curiously complete. Both 
transcend human experience, and 
neither submits to the tests of Sci- 
ence — weighing, measuring, cause- 
and-effect experimental proof. 

"Credit." 

Like our religious forms, our Eco- 
nomic System is hoary with age — a 
survival from ancient Babylonian cus- 



20 



TECHNOCRACY 



toms. It rests on assumptions un- 
sanctioned by science; its effects are 
causeless; the miraculous supersedes 
natural causation; mystery takes the 
place of human reason; and endless 
futurity is its heavenly storehouse of 
all humanly desirable things. 

A Thievish Process. 

From this miraculous store the 
"Wizard of Finance," with his wonder- 
working wand — "Credit" — filches back 
(for a slight present tangible con- 
sideration and without the owners' 
consent) the imagined products of 
imagined future toil of unborn gen- 
erations of workers — a doubly thievish 
process, as black in morals as in 
magic. 

"Money" 

While supposedly representing life- 
less things (that wear out by use), 
"money" is conventionally endowed 
(by financial magic) with everlasting 
life, and also with life's unique func- 
tion — reproduction. So "Money 
makes money" for ever and ever — 
for the Magician. 

Peace, super-abundance, and endless 
idleness — "retirement from business" — 
is "the Promised Land, flowing with 
milk and honey" of Economic Saint- 
hood — the earthly Heaven of "Fi- 
nance." 

But . . ! Never was work 

more urgent nor idleness less com- 
mon; never was peace more scarce nor 
strife so universal; the labor of future 
generations has been crazily "mort- 
gaged" by thievish "economic" (!) 
conventions beyond all possibility of 
redemption (in spite of the fact that 
science and mechanics have multiplied 
manifold the effectiveness and produc- 
tiveness of present labor); and Man's 
present vocation is social suicide — the 
destruction of wealth and the slaugh- 
ter of his fellow men! 

A stupendous and tragic record of 
"Economic" folly and failure!. 

The Mechanic's Philosophy — Success. 

The "God" of our nursery tradi- 
tion has been banished from the Ma- 
chine Shop and the world of Me- 
chanics. The result of this courage- 
ous spiritual Declaration of Indepen- 
dence has been our "Conquest of Na- 



ture," our Age of Productive Indus- 

Seemingly a like rending of thought 
shackles, a similar breaking of mental 
prison bars, is needed in the realm of 
Economics. 

When scientific imagination and 
knowledge of Nature's Laws are sub- 
stituted in our economics for chance, 
mystery, and magic; when the regu- 
lation of our Nation-wide industry is 
taken out of the hands of quib- 
b 1 i n g "lawyers", and nature's 
forces, resources, and the mechanical 
instrumentalities for their transforma- 
tion into human necessaries and de- 
sirables are no longer the play-things 
of money-juggling gamblers, and the 
products of Nature and Mechanic Arts 
no longer glut the instinctive craving 
of Acquisitive Cunning; when this 
economic childish irrationality is 
sanely substituted by organized 
Science, Technology, and specialized 
Skill co-ordinated in National Indus- 
trial Management, then will begin real 
civilization, the Age of Social Sanity, 
— Technocracy. 

"Chance" Catastrophes. 

The "God of Chance" or "God's 
mysterious providence" — which per- 
mits the killing of a President by a 
madman; the obliteration of a great 
city by fire; the sinking of a huge pas- 
senger-ship in mid-ocean; and a 
world-war — are merely misleading 
euphemisms for human ignorance, 
human improvidence, and childish 
shirking of responsibility. 

Social conventions — our Economic 
and Financial system — which by 
"money magic" make these "chance" 
catastrophes into controlling factors 
in the distribution of the product of 
human effort, are simply tragic 
monuments to ignorant superstition, 
mental laziness, and criminal folly. 

Indeed, our whole "Economic Sys- 
tem" is so incredibly unscientific, 
so irrational, so utterly puerile, 
that, were it not for custom- 
induced mental myopia, its glaring 
absurdities would long ago have suf- 
ficed — without a world-war — to shock 
our moral sense and intelligence into 
cffectivity. 

"Chance" in Economics. 

A machine is certain in action and 



TECHNOCRACY 



21 



uniform in output, because scientific 
imagination has foreseen, and con- 
structive intelligence has provided for, 
the elimination of the "chance" ele- 
ment. 

The forces which will devastate the 
results of man's industry, through the 
"natural" action of an uncontrolled 
torrential stream, (with equal uncon- 
cern) if scientifically directed, will 
make the same country-side teem with 
human happiness — but, not by 
"chance." In like manner, the same 
"natural" social forces which make 
poverty, wretchedness, and vice, will 
(with equal unconcern) produce the 
opposite results — but never by 
"chance." 

Human institutions founded upon 
"chance" merely express Man's brute- 
unintclligence. That our "Economic 
System" makes "chance" a controlling 
factor for the distribution of wealth, 
merely shows the persistence of ignor- 
ance and that old habits of thought 
are more compelling than modern in- 
telligence. To legalize "chance" delib- 
erately is to relinquish our Godlike 
control over the results of Nature's 
processes, and thus voluntarily enslave 
ourselves to ruthless Nature, and to 
abandon even our authority over the 
outcomes of our own actions. Hence, 
it would seem, that the first step to- 
ward a new and Rational Economics is 
a courageous declaration of our free- 
dom from tyranny of the insensate 
"God of Chance." 

Choice. 

When a Mechanic has decided upon 
an idea or principle as the basis of a 
proposed machine, he has exercised his 
rational freedom of choice. Regard- 
less of whether his choice is wise or 
not (in this decision) he has placed 
definite limits upon the range of sub- 
sequent selection in regard to detail 
instrumentalities. Indeed, he has en- 
tered into an implied contract — as- 
sumed a rational responsibility — to em- 
ploy only such means in the construc- 
tion of his machine as (in accord with 
Universal Order) are appropriate to 
make eflfective his proposed mechanical 
contrivance; with failure as the pen- 
alty for wilful or ignorant error — 
breach of his implied contract. 

History demonstrates conclusively 
that races, nations, civilizations (equal- 



ly with individuals), are subject to the 
same rational limitations, are bound 
by the same responsibility, and incur 
the same penalty for wilful or ignorant 
error in exercising their human free- 
dom of choice. 

Out Last Warning! 
The practical difficulties of forestall- 
ing the hazards of birth, of death, and 
of disaster, are doubtless great, and 
the problem of eliminating the 
"chance" element from our economic 
system is a man-sized job — with a slim 
probability of complete success. But, 
it is reasonably certain, that, if courage 
to make the needed change is lacking, 
or if our intelligence is insufficient 
for the task, our social adventure in 
Democracy will prove a tragedy. And 
the world war is, I believe, our last 
warning. 

Laisser Faire. 

Nor may we drift; laisser faire is 
lazy fear — cowardly re-submission to 
the dog-eat-dog jungle law, right-of 
might principle of Nature — and of Au- 
tocracy — from whicli our modern con- 
science has revolted. 

The Mechanic. 
While caution bids us pause and 
realize that Nature is ruthless in its 
punishment of ignorance and error, 
courage reminds us that Nature also is 
infinitely lavish in its rewards for 
knowledge and intelligence; and cour- 
age points to the Practical Mechanic 
as an exemplar and an object-lesson 
for the Social Constructor. 

Mechanic vs. Nature 

The Mechanic has courageously in- 
vaded Nature's guarded realm; has ac- 
cepted her "no quarter" terms; and 
has assumed complete responsibility 
for his revolt agauist all the ancient 
Occult Powers. 

He has tacitly assumed that "God" 
and "Nature" are supremely and pre- 
eminently self-sufficing; that these all- 
inclusive profundities utterly trans- 
cend the utmost limits of his acts or 
his art — that the "plans of God" and 
the Mechanic's problems cannot in 
anywise conflict. 

He predicates that "God" and "Na- 
ture" are limitlessly competent to care 
for their own infinite concerns; hence, 



ll 



TECHNOCRACY 



that his problems involve only what 
the Mechanic wants, and not "the 
wants of God." In so far as concerns 
his art (and with reverence for Uni- 
versal Order, which makes his art pos- 
sible) the Mechanic, in effect, says: 
"This I will," "Thus I do." "I am 
the Earth-god of things, of matter, 
and of motion." 

The Mechanic's Achievements 

And how gloriously has the Me- 
chanic made good! 

Even the most most cursory survey 
of his accomplishments, in manufac- 
ture, in transportation, in communica- 
tion, in reclamation, in power utiliza- 
tion generally, staggers while it exalts 
the mind. 

Has he not with wheat and corn 
from Eastern steppe and Western 
prairie, and with fresh and wholesome 
meat from the Antipodes, fed the hun- 
gry workers of Europe; and brought 
from the four corners of the Earth 
materials for their needs, their uses, 
and their industries? Yes! And from 
the teeming estuaries of the North he 
has served the "World's table with 
dainty fish, and with wine and oil and 
luscious fruit from the fertile valleys 
of the Pacific Slope. 

By his use of Nature's forces, he 
has immeasurably out-rivalled imag- 
ination's Magic Carpet, transporting 
by his mechanisms untold millions of 
work-weary families from cramped 
and life-worn areas to the free spaci- 
ousness of many wide scattered Edcns 
of plenty, there to found Empires. 

And more, he has bound these 
broadcast settlements in bonds of mu- 
tual help with space-negating bands of 
steel and steam; and on the one-time 
pathless ocean he has marked out 
highways with light and life of swift- 
moving commerce, till, in the utter- 
most ends of the earth, friend greets 
friend as though but a mile from 
home. Seas no longer separate, nor 
continents divide, for Man now talks 
with Man as face to face across the 
soundless void. 

As with a broom, he has swept sul- 
len ocean back to its deeps and bared 
Netherland's fertile plains; and with 
dyke, and mill, and pump he holds 
his prize secure from angry wave and 
wind and shifting sand. A prize in- 
deed! — a rich and prosperous country 



of towns and villages, of farms and 
homesteads, all interlr-,ed with road 
and rail and placid water-way; a hive 
of human industry — a kingdom 
snatched from ocean's grasp. 

In torrid Egypt, too, he has tamed 
the turgid Nile to flood the desert 
sands and made thereof a nation's 
granary. 

He has moved mountains, split 
continents, harnessed Niagaras to his 
machines; subdued the land, triumph- 
ed over the sea, and now seeks do- 
minion of the air. 

And, East and West and North 
and South he has sluiced and swept 
with giant streams the high-piled 
gravels, and ript and smashed and 
ground to powder, fine as from the 
mills of the gods, mountains of 
crystalline quartz; and dredged, and 
plowed, and sifted the frozen Arctic 
tundra, to tear from reluctant Earth 
its golden treasure for counters 
wherewith to play Man's world-wide 
commerce game. 

The Economist's Failure. 

All this stupendous output of hu- 
man experience, human reason, hu- 
man industry — -rivalling creation itself 
—is in startling contrast with our 
world-wide tragedy, the outcome of 
our world-wide economics. A con- 
trast doubly significant; significant 
in the entire absence of chance, of 
mystery, of magic from the work of 
the mechanic; and again as expres- 
sing the practical extremes of glori- 
ous success and of failure most tragic. 

Selective Rejection. 

The human mind, like the body, 
can advance only step by step, from 
the solid ground of the known and 
tested to the doubtful footing of the 
unfamiliar. Human progress is like 
adventuring through a morass of 
ignorance toward a far-distant goal; 
with disaster the penalty for every 
false step. 

In the great adventure called "Hu- 
man Progress" the "Occult" has 
proved a will-o-the-wisp guide. 

Notwithstanding all the stupend- 
ous accomplishments which charac- 
terize productive industry and the 
present era as the Age of Mechanics, 
the process which has brought it all 
about, is the same step-by-step — 



TECHNOCRACY 



23 



proof by experiment — scientific 
method. We can think of the new 
and unknown only in terms of the 
old and familiar. 

Still errors detected and fallacies 
perceived are guides for inventive 
synthesis — construction. 

Selection is but a process of in- 
verted rejection. So having deter- 
mined that our ideal social structure 
is the antithesis of the Autocratic idea, 
we may with confidence assinne that 
the characteristic elements of Auto- 
cracy are inappropriate for our pur- 
pose. Thus by a process of (selec- 
tive) rejection we should arrive at 
economic expedients inore in har- 
mony with our Social Ideal. 

Democracy vs. Anarchy. 

Universal Order is the key-note of 
modern Science; and upon this order- 
liness of Nature scientific thinking 
is based. Hence, the much abused 
phrases "human liberty" and "hu- 
man freedom" cannot imply anarchy 
or chaos, i. e. dis-order. 

Liberty means absence of irrational 
restraint. 

Freedom of thought can have but 
self-imposed limitations. 

Social Freedom simply means lib- 
erty for rational individual activity 
tending to the accomplishment of 
Community Purpose. 

National Self-determination. 

When a Nation — exercising its 
freedom of choice — discards Autoc- 
racy" and selects Democracy as its 
social principle it cannot sucessftilly 
retain the working elements of the 
discarded social organization. If it is 
to survive, it must adopt ways and 
means and methods of life in con- 
sonance with its chosen principle. 

Our Futile Experiment. 

The United States, like a novice 
in Mechanics, has seemingly under- 
taken the futile experiment of build- 
ing an Industrial Democracy out of 
the functional elements of Preda- 
tory Autocracy. The natural result is 
noise, friction and heat. And worse 
— a dangerously large proportion of 
our energy is wastefully expended 
in constant readjustment to keep the 
outfit running, and to prevent its 
pounding itself into scrap. Prac- 



tically the whole of our "Economic and 
Financial System" is a left-over from 
the days when absolutism and privilege 
were universally accepted ideas and 
ideals; and when magic-causation was 
an unquestioned "fact." Quite natur- 
ally our economic customs, conven- 
tions and laws are in keeping with 
these antiquated assumptions. Sub- 
stantially our "Economics" is a ves- 
tige, and as with other vestiges — like 
our vermiform appendix — it is now 
functionally useless, and frequently 
causes much unnecessary pain and. 
trouble; which sooner or later may end 
in tragedy. 

Not All Bad. 

While, in the foregoing, there is no 
real cause for pessimism, there is even 
less reason for happy-go-lucky optim- 
isin. 

Mentally reviewing this matter, 
there appear several implications 
which stand out clearly as definite 
practical suggestions for economic re- 
construction. 

Suggestions for Reconstruction. 

First: That "chance" means ignor- 
ance. 

The elimination of even the crudely 
obvious "chance" factors from our 
laws, customs and economic conven- 
tions, would do away with much rank 
injustice in our social functioning. 

Second: That the onward flow of 
time is not reversible — the future can- 
not help the present. 

A clear appreciation and practical 
application of this seemingly axiom- 
atic proposition would go far to rem- 
edy the grosser evils of capitalistic 
economics, and strip "money" and 
"credit" of their conventionally en- 
dowed time-reversing magic. 

In every physical human accom- 
plishment, there are involved but 
three factors or elements: raw Ma- 
terial (Nature's free gift); human 
Time; human Energy. Every product 
(food, clothing, housing, transporta- 
tion facilities, or what not), represents 
a definite amount of past human time 
and past human energy — gone beyond 
recall. Neither by ghostly hands nor 
by flibber-gib financial conventions can 
future work or future product be 
yanked back into the present, to be 
used for present purposes, or to meet 



24 



TECHNOCRACY 



present emergencies — even if self-re- 
spect and common honesty did not suf- 
fice to prevent such inexcusable cam- 
ouflaged robbery of the helpless, the 
quintessence of "taxation without rep- 
resentation." 

Third: That cause-and-cfFect, not 
whim, is the order of Nature's pro- 
cesses. 

Science shows us that, so far as Man 
is concerned, Nature is infinite poten- 
tialities; potentialities realizable in 
terms of individual and collective pur- 
poses. We can if we will — providing 
our aims and objectives are in accord 
with the Rational Order of Nature. 

It is only in purposive action that 
huinan freedom — self-determination — 
is expressed. 

An aimless man or a purposeless 
"nation" is an equally insignificant 
fragment of raw material in Nature's 
Evolutionary and Devolutionary pro- 
cesses. But, knowledge of Nature and 
of Nature's Laws co-ordinated by Hu- 



man Intelligence in rationally purpos- 
ive actions, have all of Nature's in- 
finite potentialities and stupendous 
forces as tools to facilitate accom- 
plishment. 

Purposive Co-ordination. 

Obviously the control of our Great 
National Workshop — the United States 
— should not be in the hands 
of selfish Mr. Acquisitive Cunning — 
"who knows the price of everything 
and the value of nothing" — facile only 
in getting something for nothing — and 
whose highest social ideal is: "To buy 
cheap and sell dear"; but — in reason, 
in common horse sense! — our purpos- 
ive Industrial Democracy should be 
guided and directed by nationally or- 
ganized and co-ordinated specialists in 
all the branches of Skill, Technology, 
and Science which are involved in its 
Social Life and requisite to the suc- 
cessful accomplishment of its Great 
National Objective. 



Fernwald, Berkeley, February, 1919. 



IS THE ONWARD FLOW OF TIME REVERSIBLE 
BY HUMAN CONVENTION? 



Technocracy 



PART IV. 
Skill Economics for Industrial Democracy. 

By William Henry Smyth 

Note — ^^In the previous essays of this series the author shows that men's 
characterizing activities express certain instincts or instinctive urges and 
that human societies (nations) today consist of uncoordinated groups, each 
bent upon gratifying its predominating instinctive urge — at the expense 
of other groups and regardless of the common weal. He proposes as a 
remedy for this social strife a plan of National Co-ordination — Technocracy. 

This article discusses some of the important phases more in detail, 
with constructive suggestions for the elimination of "chance," "mystery," 
and "magic" from our present economic processes, the substitution of 
intelligent purposive ways and means for haphazard methods; and for 
self-interested autocratic control, the substitution of Scientific [Leadership 
organized for the accomplishment of consensus National Objectives. — Editor 



Our Nationwide Machine Shop. 

Attempting to make a robust man 
conform to nursery usages and 
swaddling clothes conventions would 
be no more absurd than our present 
efforts to conduct Twentieth Cen- 
tury life on the Hunter and Sheep- 
herder customs of our racial infancy. 

Indeed, it would be less preposter- 
ous than our continued efforts (de- 
spite tragic experience) to have law- 
yers and gamblers run our nationwide 
Machine Shop by methods and under 
conventions not differing essentially 
from ancient Babylonish laws of King 
Hamurabi and economic customs in 
vogue two thousand years before 
Christ. 

Childish Economics, 

Human society started with Brute- 
force Economics, suitable to Cave- 
man — Hunter and Fighter ^ times. 
Then humanity advanced through the 
Pastoral — animal breeder — stage, be- 
ing therein confronted, socially and 
economically, with the awe-inspiring 
marvel of phallic phenomena, the fear- 
ful mystery of Death and the joy- 
inciting miracle of Life — life with its 
seemingly endless sequence of pro- 
duction and reproduction. 

The Animal Breeder stage of de- 
velopment, indeed, seems to have left 
an indelible impression; seems to have 
peculiarly influenced man's mental 
outlook and modified his thinking pro- 
cesses so profoundly as to have 



shaped even our modern business con- 
ventions and daily practices — or at 
least to have provided favorable 
psychic habitat for our conventional 
economic irrationalities. 

Mysticism and Symbolism. 

The mind-staggering miracle of 
generation seems to have thrown 
primitive human thinking back upon 
itself in dazed befogment — bewilder- 
ment and mistunderstanding of Na- 
ture's laws, out of which confusion of 
thought emerged Mysticism with its 
magic symbolism. 

This mental chaos of mystic sym- 
bolism — the endowment of the sym- 
bol (or "renresentative") with the 
qualities and functions of the thing 
symbolized — is a primordial explana- 
tory perversion which still character- 
izes our commonplace thinking on 
monetary matters. The "power of 
monev" is proverbial among us; and. 
that "money makes money" is axio- 
matic to the average man; also that 
"monev makes the mare go," and that 
it performs many other strenuously 
animistic stunts. 

Money, Mortgages and Nehemiah. 

Down through the ages occasion- 
ally we find (both in ecclesiastic and 
lay writings) clearly reasoned repro- 
bation of practices based upon this 
naive misinterpretation of the facts of 
Nature. 



26 



TECHNOCRACY 



"The words of Nehemiah, the son of 
HacaHah" and cup bearer of Ar- 
taxerxes, king of Persia, are as "mod- 
ern" today as on the day they were 
uttered — nearly five hundred years 
before Christ. 

And they are as applicable to the 
"civilized" world today as they were 
to the kindergarten usages and anti- 
social practices of our civilization's 
nursery — Mesopotamia. 

"Some also there were that said, 
We are mortgaging our fields and our 
vineyards, and our houses: let us get 
corn, because of the dearth. There 
were some also that said, We have 
borrowed money for the king's tribute 
upon our fields and our vineyards. Yet 
now our flesh is as the flesh of our 
brethren, our children as their chil- 
dren: and lo, we bring into bondage 
our sons and our daughters to be ser- 
vants, and some of our daughters are 
brought into bondage already; neither 
is it in our power to help it; for other 
men have our fields and our vineyards. 

"And I was very angry when I 
heard their cry and these words. 

"Then I consulted with myself, and 
contended with the nobles and the 
rulers, (or deputies) and said unto 
them. Ye exact usury, every one of 
his brother. And I held a great as- 
sembly against them. 

"And I said unto them. We after 
our ability have redeemed our breth- 
ren the Jews, which were sold unto the 
heathen; and would ye even sell your 
brethren? and should they be sold 
unto us? 

"Then held they their peace, and 
found never a word. 

"Also I said, The thing that ye 
do is not good: 

"And I likewise, my brethren and 
. my servants, do lend them money 
and corn on usury. I pray you let 
us leave off this usury. 

"Restore, I pray you, to them, even 
this day, their fields, their vineyards, 
their olive yards, and their houses, 
also the hundredth part of the money, 
and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, 
that ye exact of them. 

"Then said they. We will restore 
them, and require nothing of them; 
so will we do, even as thou sayest. 

"Then I called the priests, and took 
an oath of them, that they should do 
according to this promise. 

Also I shook out my lap, and said. 



So God shake out every man from 
his house, and from his labor, that 
performcth not this promise; even 
thus be he shaken out, and emptied. 

"And all the congregation said. 
Amen, and praised the Lord. 

"And the people did according to 
this promise." (Nehemiah Chap. 5.) 

Money, Reason and Rome. 

Practical minded ancient Rome, 
from whom we have learned so 
much of our work-a-day jurispru- 
dence — while retaining many other 
gross superstitions — seems to have 
rejected this animistic pecuniary 
absurdity, as is shown by the familiar 
expression: Money does not procreate 
money — "Nummus nummum non 
parit." 

Money, Sheep and Shylock. 

The genius of Shakespeare realized 
\he fatuity of this pastoral-age- 
founded pecuniary delusion that 
"money breeds money" (which still 
obsesses our misbegotten finance 
conventions), and holds it up to de- 
served ridicule: 

(The Merchant of Venice — Act 1 

Scene 3.) 

Shylock: 

When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's 

sheep — 

Antonio: 
And what of him? Did he take 

interest? 

Shylock: 
No, not take interest, not, as you 

would say. 
Directly interest: mark M'hat 

Jacob did. 
When Laban and himself were 

compromised 
That all the eanlings which were 

streaked and pied 
Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes, 

being rank, 
In the end of autumn turned to 

the rams. 
And, when the work of generation 

was 
Between these woolly breeders in 

the act, 
The skilful shepherd peel'd me 

certain wands 
And, in the doing of the deed of 

kind. 
He stuck them up before the fulsome 

ewes, 
Who then conceiving did in eaning 

time 



TECHNOCRACY 



27 



Fall parti-colored lambs, and those 

were Jacob's. 
This was a way to thrive, and he 

was blessed: 
And thrift is blessing, if men steal 

it not. 

Antonio: 
This was a venture, sir, that Jacob 

served for; 
A thing not in his power to bring 

to pass. 
But sway'd and fashion'd by the 

hand of heaven. 
Was this inserted to make interest 

good? 
Or is your gold and silver ewes 

and rams ? 

Shylock: 
I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast: 

Adolescent Economics. 

Magic-Mystery tinged Breeder- 
economics and vocational experience 
(misinterpreted) quite naturally re- 
sulted in Theocracy and Theocratic- 
economics; and from Theocracy the 
course is straight, the steps easy and 
obvious to Working-by-proxy social 
systems — Privilege-economics — as 
represented by Autocracy, Aris- 
tocracy, and modern Plutocracy. 

Thus the race has successively 
adopted Strength-economics, Cun- 
ning-economics, and Cunning-Strong- 
economics; each system appropriate 
to the conditions of life and stage 
of development, in the past. 

Adult Economics. 

Today is the day of Doer, Work- 
er, Maker— practical utilizer of 
Nature by skill of hand and science- 
taught bra-in — the Mechanic. 

This is an age of applied Science — 
the utilization of Nature's Laws and 
forces — consequently the earlier 
mystic, predatory, and parasitic 
economic usages and conventions are 
now antiquated and impracticable. 
Hence they are beginning to revolt 
our science-developed practical com- 
mon sense, our sense of propriety, 
and our modern sense of justice. 

Furthermore, it is significantly in 
accord with race experience, with 
commonsense and with reason that: 

Those whose activities characterize 
the times, must initiate and adminis- 
ter its economics. 

So if our Mechanistic Age, our 
Democratic Dispensation is not to 



prove a futile race experiment, a 
will-o-the-wisp ideal, we must ini- 
tiate Skill-economics, economics of 
our Twentieth Century mechanis- 
tically characterized activities — eco- 
nomics of the Scientist, of the Tech- 
nologist, of the Mechanic, on a 
nationwide scale, in other words: 
National Industrial Management — 
Technocracy. 

Skill Economics. 

The Mechanic's philosophy as- 
sumes: the neutral orderliness of 
Nature; personal freedom; and per- 
sonal responsibility for the outcome 
of his acts. 

The Mechanic's practice is based 
upon: personal initiative; self- reli- 
ance; and the validity of experience. 

The Mechanic's success results 
from: knowledge of Nature's laws; 
experimental proof; and the elim- 
ination of "chance." 

It is reasonable, therefore, to 
assume that upon these fundamentals 
also must be framed our new work- 
a-day Skill-economics, in order to be 
workable in our work-a-day Mechan- 
istic Age. 

As applied to our present obso- 
lescent economics these principles 
imply: 

Elimination of Magic (as a tacitly 
assumed factor) in the means and 
methods of production. 

Elimination of Mystery from our 
means and methods of exchanging 
human efforts and resulting products. 

Elimination of Chance from in- 
dustrial organization and distribution. 

Twixt Devil and Deep Sea. 

Stated as generalities, few will 
question the desirability of such 
changes; for it will readily be con- 
ceded that "chance," "mystery," and 
"magic" are merely expressions of 
ignorance clothed in old and familiar 
superstitions. But, when one comes 
truly to realize — not just verbally 
admit — how completely magic, mys- 
tery, and chance are woven into the 
fabric of our modern life and 
thought processes, then the true sig- 
nificance of the propositions strikes 
the mind with a sense of shock. 

We are, indeed, between the devil 
and the deep sea! 

Radically change we must, or our 



28 



TECHNOCRACY 



"Civilization" will go the way of 
previous abortive social experiments 
— Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, 
Rome, Spain, and . . . Europe. 

But, characteristically, the huge 
majority of us would rather be 
socially damned in the good old- 
fashioned way, than accept social 
salvation through radical change. 
Yet, if human experience proves any- 
thing, it demonstrates conclusively 
that irrationality cannot persist in 
the rational Order of Nature. 

Chuck-a-Luck Economics. 

Thus it will, perchance, be help- 
ful to indicate some implications of 
the suggested eliminations, by more 
specific applications to present social, 
economic and financial customs, 
usages, and conventions. 

Birth, Marriage, Death, are the 
time-worn dice in our chuck-a-luck 
economics. 

Birth, in surroundings of wealth 
or poverty — on Fifth Avenue or in 
the Bowery — decides whether a child 
shall be a Master or a Servant, an 
owner or a slave, a nationally con- 
trolling factor or one of a million 
mere "cogs," regardless of inherent 
fitness to the "chance" ordained 
position, or to further the aims of 
the community. 

Marriage, under our quaint eco- 
nomic conventions, decides into 
whose hands shall be entrusted 
power represented by vast accumula- 
tions of wealth, regardless of the 
chances that the easily acquired 
wealth may be frivolously squan- 
dered or used adversely to national 
purposes. 

Death, with sardonic irrelevance, 
plays skittles with the lives of the 
living; for our weirdly jocund "laws 
of . devise" empower dead hands 
from the grave to control thousands 
of living men's activities. 

Makers and Takers. 
Under our "cconoinic and finance 
system" to be born into our Mechan- 
istic Age with mechanical and con- 
structive traits — dextrous hands, inge- 
nious brain, and irresistible instinctive 
urge to do, to work, to make the 
things which constitute our "wealth" — 
is to be fore-doomed by "chance" to 
lifelong obscurity, social impotence, 
and relative poverty; while to be- born 



with instinctive acquisitive cunning 
and insatiable greed, is to be elected 
by "chance" to social distinction, 
wealth and power. 

Indeed, it would seem, that of all 
the facts, circumstances, and incidents, 
constituting present conditions of hu- 
man life, "blind chance" has irration- 
ally been selected as the controlling 
factor in that antiquated collection of 
queer customs, quaint conventions and 
grotesque superstitions, that, with 
childish fatuity, we call our "Science 
of Economics and Finance." 

Magic — Ancient and Modern. 

To gage the folly of earlier ages 
by our own advance is an easy and 
vanity satisfying diversion; to correct- 
ly measure the ignorance and super- 
stition of our own times is a hopeless 
task. 

Thus we look back with smiling con- 
tempt upon Devil-raising, Soul- 
selling, Fountain-of-youth, Witch's- 
broomstiok, and other wondrous para- 
phernalia of "Black Art." And yet, no 
essential difference exists between the 
old witchcraft, by which a "magic po- 
tion" added years to human life, and 
modern "financial" black art which 
gives everlasting life to inanimate 
"capital" and endows lifeless "money" 
with life's unique function — reproduc- 
tion — so that "money makes money" 
for ever and ever. Indeed, of the two 
the modern magic causation is the 
more crudely illogical and unscientific; 
for while the ancient black art only 
purported to prolong life already ex- 
isting, modern financial magic pre- 
tends to perform the still greater 
miracle of infusing life into inanimate 
objects! 

Do I seem to exaggerate? 

Then read what Economic High 
Priest Boehm-Bawerk says in his 
"Capital and Interest — A Critical His- 
tor^r of Economic Theory"; says seri- 
ously, supremely unconscious that he 
is describing a crazily impossible mir- 
acle — a miracle, however, in which 
there is a substantially universal con- 
sensus of ignorant belief. 

"And finally it (interest) flows to 
the capitalist without ever exhausting 
the capital from which it comes, and 
therefore without any necessary limit 
to its continuance. It is, if one may 
use such an expression about mundane 
things, capable of an everlasting life. 



TECHNOCRACY 



29 



Thus it is that the phenomenon of in- 
terest as a whole presents the remark- 
able picture of a lifeless thing produc- 
ing- an everlasting and inexhaustible 
supply of goods." 

Was ever gross superstitious ignor- 
ance or "black art" more crassly 
at variance with facts and Nature's 
Laws or the Sciences of Physics and 
Mechanics, than this self-filling "magic 
purse" of financial wizardry? 

Time Turned Tailward! 

If there is one fact in human ex- 
perience, the validity of which is be- 
yond question, it is that the onward 
flow of Time is non-reversible, the fu- 
ture cannot help the present. 

We can change the direction of mo- 
tion in physical things — back up a 
horse, a train, or a boat, or even in 
some instances reverse the flow of a 
river; but to turn back the inexorable 
forward march of Time is unthinkable. 

To suggest shooting the Germans 
with future bullets and feeding our 
soldier boys with future food — substi- 
tuting "future savings" (!) of future 
generations tor present savings and 
present work, seems — to a Mechanic — 
like the insane imaginings of a magic- 
crazed brain. 

Yet, these arc tlic stupendous mir- 
acles which the "magic of finance" se- 
riously purports to accomplish — for a 
small present consideration. 

Do I seem to exaggerate? 

Then read the serious proposal of 
Financial Wizard Frank A. Vander- 
lip, President of the National City 
Bank of New York. 

"This war must be financed, not out 
of past savings, but out of future sav- 
ings. Future savings are for the mo- 
ment not available and some other 
device must therefore be brought into 
play. That device is bank credit, and 
this loan and subsequent loans will in 
the main be floated through an expan- 
sion of credit." 

Truly human credulity is limitless — 
or the day of witchcraft and miracles 
is not past! 

Futilities of Magic. 

Never in one solitary instance, in all 

the hundreds of years and millions of 

sacrificial victims, did entrails of 

slaughtered animals foretell a future 



happening; never did any of the armies 
of Devils and "familiar spirits," in- 
voked by magic incantations, effect 
any earthly result which would not 
otherwise have occurred; never was 
solitary grain of gold transmuted from 
base metal by the magic of the 
myriads of guaranteed "Philosopher's 
Stones"; never did any of these mir- 
acles happen — except in the distorted 
imaginings of the simple ones who 
paid the Magicians for their futilities. 
And the poor boobs who "paid the 
piper" didn't know any more about 
magic then, than the average man of 
today who frankly asserts: "I don't 
know a damned thing about Econom- 
ics a,nd Finance." 

"Future Savings"! 
Recalling practical warlike Rome, 
fighting her world-conquering battles 
or refraining from attack on the au- 
gury of fowl's entrails; remembering 
philosophical Greece conducting her 
civil, military, and economic aft'airs up- 
on the assumed guidance of similar 
irrationalities; not forgetting that in 
comparatively recent times, by "sell- 
ing indulgences," — dealing in "future 
savings," "treasures in heaven," i. e., 
'"floating (super-mundane) credit" — 
and by commerce in other optimistic 
and supposititious commodities, "the 
Church" acquired legal ownership to 
over half of the land and wealth of 
England; not overlooking the fact that 
by similar supposititious means mod- 
ernized, the Mormon Church of the 
Latter Day Saints has become one of 
the wealthiest and socially most pow- 
erful capitalistic corporations in our 
midst today; calmly and dispassionate- 
ly turning these facts over in the 
mind, causes one to pause and reflect. 
Indeed, mentally reviewing this ages 
long and unquestionable historical ev- 
idence, one — embucd with modern 
scientific notions — begins to wonder. 

Questions and Doubts. 

One wonders how "dollars" or 
"debts" can be magically endowed 
with life? 

How magically endowed with "ever- 
lasting life?" 

How magically endowed with the 
capability of unending reproduction? 
— "a lifeless thing producing an ever- 
lasting and inexhaustible supply of 
goods." 



30 



TECHNOCRACY 



And thus wondering, one questions 
and doubts. . . . 

Can it be that the "miracles of fi- 
nance" and the "magic of credit" are 
of a piece with the ancient miracles and 
magic? — only, (in keeping with the 
h. c. 1.) gone up in cost to the simple 
ones who pay for the "miraculous" 
performances. 

But what a cost! 

Distribution. 

Science and Mechanics have multi- 
plied manifold the productive effect of 
human effort during the past century, 
.so that the resulting products and in- 
strumentalities of production have in- 
creased in like ratio. 

So the question naturally arises as 
to what disposition has been made 
of this great aggregation of National 
Commissariat Stores in the United 
States under our alleged "economic" 
system? 

How have the "Financiers" — our 
book-keepers — kept tab on the "debits 
and credits"? 

How have they (numerically less 
than one per cent) distributed this 
product of the combined work of the 
twenty million families that, in round 
numbers, constitute (the other ninety- 
nine per cent of )the population? 

The Balance Sheet. 

In round numbers the books show: 
$250,000,000.000— "wealth" ; 

$70,000,000,000— gross "profits"; di- 
vided: — 

$50,000,000,000— "income" to the 
book-keepers; 

$.?0.000,000,000— "wage" to the fam- 
ilies; 

$1,000 — average family "wage." 
Thus the balance sheet shows that 
the self-selected and sociallj'' irrespon- 
sible score-keepers — the "Financiers" 
— have apportioned the gross yearly 
"profits" of the United States National 
Industrial Enterprise in the ratio of 
five-sevenths to themselves and two- 
sevenths to the 20 million families. 

"Business" and Instincts. 

In the jargon of "Business," "the 
Financiers" "charge" fifty billion dol- 
lars _($_5O,0O0,000,0l30) yearly for "fi- 
nanciering" the United States. 

That is to say: "The Interests" as- 
sess the People of the United States 



fifty billion dollars ($50,000,000,000) 
"interest" tribute yearly, in perpetuity, 
for permitting the people the privilege 
of practicing national honesty — and 
for the magic of (mysteriously con- 
ventionalized) "Credit." 

In other words: "The Capitalists" 
tax the People of the United States 
fifty billion dollars ($50,000,000,000) 
yearly for permitting the People the 
privilege of utilizing the Nation's hu- 
man and other natural resources — and 
for (the miracles of) "Capitalization." 

In simple terms of human instincts: 
The Instinctive Takers take the In- 
stinctive Makers' makings for permitt- 
ing the Makers to make the Nation's 
natural raw materials into desirable 
commodities. 

Feeding and Breeding. 

The families must, of course, be 
fed and clotlied and housed, and the 
children schooled, — or the supply of 
Makers would soon peter out. 

For these unavoidable necessities 
the "Financiers" allow, on an average, 
a thousand dollars a year per family; 
a "bare living wage" in exchange for 
a whole year of the brief work-life 
(of twenty odd years), for life-energy 
irrecoverably used up in making the 
wealth; wealth out of which bare sus- 
tenance is all that goes to its Makers. 

Worse and More of It. 

Nor is this all, nor the worst. 

It deals with things only, now in 
existence. And it refers to an appor- 
tionment of the gross "profits" ar- 
rived at (more or less) by our own 
consent. 

But, — by the wondrous working of 
"Credit" — the "Financiers" have vir- 
tually pawned (in their own pawn 
shop) the whole Industrial World! 

The "Financiers." have placed a per- 
petual mortgage plaster of at least one 
thousand billion dollars ($1,000,000,- 
000,000) on the work and products of 
unborn generations of the hundred 
million families constituting the 
"White World." 

The "Financiers" have chained thus 
a $10,000 debt, paying "interest" trib- 
ute of $2.00 per day (for ever) upon 
the back of each and every family in 
the "civilized world" — a perpetual 
thraldom gf debt; debt secured by 
"Bonds," by "Mortgage," by "Capi- 



TECHNOCRACY 



talization" and by "National Debt" 
conventions. 

The "Financiers" have thus placed 
this huge mortgage debt (in perpet- 
uity) upon future generations with- 
out their consent — the most stupend- 
ous case of tyrannous "taxation with- 
out representation" in all the dark 
ages long tragic experience of long 
suffering humanity. 

What petty "Pikers" were the Shy- 
locks of old Nehemiah's day compared 
to our . . . our . . . "Financiers"^. 

Crowning Paradox. 

Poverty is the opposite of riches; 
debt the negation of wealth; bank- 
ruptcy the reverse of solvency; they 
are antithcticals — the plus and minus 
signs of human interaction in the 
world of "Business." 

A modern man, by the aid of scienti- 
fic and mechanistic instrumentalities, 
accomplishes more today than one-, 
two-, and in some cases ten-score men 
of a hundred years ago; so, despite 
war and every other destructive 
agency, production outstrips bare 
need today as at no time in the past. 

The world is constantly increasing 
its total products. 

Yet, notwithstanding these facts, 
the richer the world grows, the more 
it owes — both relatively and actually; 
the greater its w'ealtli, the deeper it 
is plunged in debt. 

Thus, under the regime of capitalis- 
tic "High Finance," is achieved the 
crowning paradox of all time — the 
acme of miraculous causation : 

The functions of plus and minus are 
reversed; more is less! The larger 
a thing grows the smaller it becomes! 
The more efficient men get, the less 
effective relatively is the outcome! 
The faster the world cistern is filled 
with wealth the more nearly empty 
it is, — the more completely is the 
White World bankrupt!! 

The ancient miracle of "the 
widow's cruse" is inverted — by mod- 
ern Financial Magic. 

An Old Delusion. 

Now it is not intei.ded to impute 
deliberately dishonest or intentionally 
unethical methods to our Financiers 
and Capitalists, under a. vague and 
metaphorical term, "Magic." On the 
contrary, I use the word "magic" in 



its ordinary meaning — supernatural 
effects. 

I am convinced that the great ma- 
jority of us — capitalist and laborer 
alike — are still obsessed with the fal- 
lacy of magic causation; an ancient 
delusion that has dominated men's 
minds and befogged their thinking 
from the very beginning of man's 
efforts to explain the causes of un- 
usual happenings. 

"Magic" is the oldest and easiest 
way to account for strange things, 
and still holds its ancient sway over 
men's minds outside the laboratory 
of the scientist and the workshop of 
the mechanic. 

Elimination of this fallacy as a con- 
trolling factor in the distribution of 
products — wealth — is a necessary step 
toward a rationally workable eco- 
nomic system; a system adapted to 
20th Century life and the mental at- 
titude of our science-made Mecha- 
nistic Age. 

Mystery. 

"Chance" implies insufficient knowl- 
edge of causes. 

"Magic" implies misinterpretation 
of causes. 

"Mystery" implies inherent un- 
knowal)leness of causes. 

While increasing knowledge tends 
ever toward minimizing the "chance" 
element and lessening of "magic" 
errors, mj^stery presents a different 
problem. 

The laboratory, or the factory, or 
the workshop, or the countinghouse, 
is no place for "mystery," for to 
the workers therein mystery means 
ignorance — -lack of intelligence. In 
human life at large, it is quite other- 
wise as concerns the essential All- 
inclusive Mystery and religious mys- 
ticism. This is a fact of profound 
significance in relation to the larger 
aspect of our "Social Problem." 

Our new Skill Economics, there- 
fore, may not discourage man's in- 
nate love of mystery, — his inborn re- 
ligious spirituality — nor curb the 
spirit which tempts him to adventure 
courageously into the unknown; but 
instead should provide advantageous 
scope for its personal expression. 

But — as in the machine shop — 
"mystery" is out of place in finance; 
out of place because the function of 



2,2 



TECHNOCRACY 



"money" in an economic system cor- 
responds to the purposes of checks 
and gauges, templets and measuring 
instruments of the technologist and 
the mechanical constructor. 

The essentials of such devices are 
accuracy, certainty, invariability — the 
antitheses of the qualities of mys- 
tery. 

Yet in no branch of human activity 
are its measuring devices so incon- 
sistent, contradictory, inaccurate; so 
mysteriously variable, so subject to 
anti-social self-interested control as 
are those of the Financier — his twin 
mysteries, "Money" and "Credit." 

Our Queer Dollar. 

One of the many quaint functions 
of the dollar is that of a "standard 
of value." As a matter of fact, no 
one knows or can determine from 
moment to moment, what is the 
value of a dollar. We only know 
that its worth is diminishing, vari- 
ously, to the vanishing point. 

Neither the Nation nor the Mone- 
tary Experts, nor the Professors of 
Economics, nor the Financiers, nor 
the Interests, nor the Capitalists, nor 
the Common Man, have ever suc- 
ceeded in fixing our "standard of 
value" — standardizing the value of 
our "standard of value" — the worth 
of our Dollar. 

Mr. Worker contends that the con- 
traction of the dollar is due to ex- 
pansion in the cost of living; so he 
strikes for more dollars, and effects 
another shrink. Mr. Trader says the 
contraction is due to the expansion 
of wages; so he boosts up the price 
of products, and effects still another 
contraction. And so on and on, and 
the end is not yet! 

Indeed, there are as many different 
explanations of this mysterious 
"spooky" phenomenon in our 
"Standard" almost as there are ex- 
plainers — and their number is legion. 

An Elastic Foot Rule! 

If our foot-rule were subject to 
similar mysterious fluctuations, its 
length would have shrunk to four 
inches or so (!) in the past five years, 
with innumerable variations from 
time to time. 

Imagine the chaos, had such a mys- 
teriously variable standard of mea- 



surement been used in the machine 
shop! 

The stress of War conditions has 
so completely demonstrated the in- 
utility of our mysteriously elastic so- 
called "standard of value and medium 
of exchange" that it is now virtually 
in the discard, — stacked up uselessly 
in private and in national treasury 
vaults. 

Our alleged "standard of value and 
medium of exchange" never was a 
standard of value, and now it is not 
even a medium of 'exchange. Quaint, 
but true! 

A practically costless, hence un- 
varying, "medium of exchange" — a 
one-function monej^ — is another much 
needed step toward a rational eco- 
nomic system. 

Credit. 

But if our money is a mysterious 
commodity, what shall be said of 
"Credit"? 

"Monej^" — i.e., "gold coin of the 
United States of the present standard 
of weight and fineness" — even though 
lacking in practical utility, is at least 
a physical commodity. It occupies 
space (however uselessly) ; it has 
color, weight, length, breadth and 
thickness, — it possesses physical char- 
acteristics easily determinable by 
scientific tests. 

Not one of these facts is applicable 
to "Credit." 

"Credit" is a state of mind, a 
psychological condition — hypnosis — a 
mesmeric dream. Naturally it lacks 
all the qualities of physical things, 
and possesses all those of phan- 
tasms. A man dreams he is wealthy, 
and — for all dream purposes — he is 
wealthy; even though in actual fact 
he is dying of starvation in squalor 
and want. 

So too, in like manner, a nation 
dreams itself some (or many) billions 
of additional wealth; sets the print- 
ing presses going to record the 
dream — in "bonds"; and forthwith 
becomes billions wealthier (in its 
mind), though, as a matter of fact, 
the physical wealth may have shrunk 
to the danger point of general in- 
digence and starvation. 

This is the danger-fraught "World 
condition" today. 



TECHNOCRACY 



33 



Boundless Credit Wealth 

Seemingly human stupidity is lim- 
itless and human credulity infinite! 
This boundless, unweighable, unmea- 
surable, hope-created dream-stuff 
("Credit") is sliced and apportioned, 
like beef or butter, and sold in the 
market place by self-appointed pur- 
veyors of public optimism. 

Yes! Sold and exchanged for the 
limited, measurable, physical prod- 
ucts of sweaty and grimy toil and 
strenuous human effort. 

Like all other dreams and dream- 
stuff, "Credit" visions know no 
bounds but those of desire. Millions 
or billions or scores of billions — it's 
all the same in the wonderland 
dreamworld of "Finance": wish them 
and dream them, and presto! they 
exist. They exist: dream ships, 
dream cannons, dream food — irides- 
cent wealth bubbles blown up and 
"floated through an expansion of 
credit," as proposed by Finance Wiz- 
ard Vanderlip. 

Dream Wealth. 

It is not surprising therefore that 
in the wonderland of Finance this 
dreamworld's dream wealth "Credit" 
— as represented by "credit instru- 
ments," i. e., stocks, bonds, mortgages, 
national debts, etc. — transcends great- 
ly the workaday world's physical 
utilities — real wealth. 

But what is going to happen when 
we are jolted awake to the rationality 
of workaday reality, and dream 
visions vanish; when the airy 
floating credit bubble bursts — as bub- 
bles do? When Germany and Austria 
follow Russia's (Bolshevik) example, 
and France follows Germany, and 
then England, and then . . . ? 

Then what? 

When this happens, the world will 
discard the silly delusion that time is 
reversible by financial magic — credit; 
"credit," the greatest of all myths and 
magic makebelieves by which cunning 
men in all ages have sought to get 
something for nothing. 

In all the historically recorded cases 
of collective human delusions — from 
practical Rome's entrail augury to 
shrewd Yankee .Salem's witchcraft — 
there is none which surpasses, in col- 
lective crass credulity, our great Credit 
Myth! 
A national (non-tribute) bookkeep- 



ing system equitably to determine real 
ownership of the products of effort, 
is a much needed economic conven- 
ience. 

Experimental Science. 

It would seem that with the advent 
of Experimental Science occurred an 
epoch in the history of our Race; an 
epochal event to which none other 
is comparable, except possibly the ac- 
quisition of Self-consciousness itself. 
Indeed it would seem that these two 
super-significant events — so unthink- 
ably far apart in time — are, in essence, 
closely related. 

By coming to Self-consciousness 
the Brute became Man — potentially, 
though not actually, a self-determining 
being. 

By the coming of Science — based 
upon the idea of the rationality and 
neutrality of "nature" — potential Free- 
dom ceased to be a mere possibility 
and became a realizable Ideal. 

To Make or Break Shackles. 

Science and Technology arc, how- 
ever, but tools in Man's hands; tools 
wherewith to make effective Man's 
transcendent privilege: Freedom of 
Choice. 

Groups of men (like Germany) may 
use these great instrumentalities to 
forge social shackles upon themselve.-, 
and upon Humanity the bondage of 
autocracy. 

Or, they may use them to make hu- 
man Liberty effective, as is the ideal 
of the LTnitcd States. 

Human beings, whether as individ- 
uals, or as groups, or as nations, are 
"free" — self-determining — only when 
purposively initiative; for it is only 
in purposive action that liberty can be 
expressed. 

Freedom, then, means will to intelli- 
gent self-expression — liberty ex- 
pressed in rational accomplishment. 

"Reconstruction." 

On all the foregoing considerations, 
our problem of "Social Reconstruc- 
tion" on a scientific basis implies sys- 
tematizing our great but inchoate Na- 
tion upon economic principles appro- 
priate to an Industrial Democracy. 

The basis of modern industry being 
scientific knowledge of nature's laws 
whereby nature's resources are made 
available for human use and enjoy- 



34 



TECHNOCRACY 



mcnt through the aid and agency of 
technical skill, "Reconstruction" be- 
comes essentially a process of selec- 
tive rejection of present inappropriate 
economic usages; discarding customs 
which unduly facilitate the acquisitive 
instincts, and substituting others 
which tend to minimize social ob- 
stacles to the freer expression of the 
constructive or industrial instincts — 
in the interest of the commonweal. 

As industrial processes involve spe- 
cialized skill and expert technical 
training, made effective by intelligent 
co-ordination, it is clear that a hu- 
manly efficient Industrial Democracy 
necessitates leadership by those who 
possess the requisite knowledge, skill, 
and technical training. 

So, when we speak of Industrial De- 
mocracy, what we really mean is: 
Nation-wide Industry managed by 
Technologists — a Nation of free and 
socially equal workers, scientifically 
organized for mutual benefit and uni- 
fied purpose — a Technocracy. 

Suggestions. 

By way of summary, a few of the 
more obviously inappropriate present 
usages which, seemingly with advan- 
tage, we might consign to the limbo 
of outw'orn social expedients, here fol- 
low: 

(I) Discard usages founded on the 
autocratic idea of "the State"; 

Substitute therefor — in fact as well 
as in theory — others resting upon the 
self-evident right of a man to inalien- 
able and complete ownership of him- 
self; hence (in effect) inalienable own- 
ership of the industrial product result- 
ing from the functioning of his mind 
and body — limited only by others' 
equal right. 

(II) Discard conventions resting 
upon the parasitic idea that (legal) 
possession is equivalent to production: 

Substitute natural ownership based 
on making for conventions that legal- 
ize taking. 

(III) Discard institutions legaliz- 
ing "chance" as a controlling factor 
for the distribution of things; 

Substitute therefor collective fore- 
sight based upon experience; and hu- 
man need for instinctive animal greed 
— in the interest of the commonweal. 

(IV) Discard "financial magic" 
practices resting upon the animistic 
fallacy that inanimate objects can (by 



convention) be endowed with life's 
unique function — reproduction ; 

Substitute others on the evidential 
fact that only human beings can make 
usefully available the things we call 
"wealth." 

(V) Discard the "mysteries of fi- 
nance" in wealth distributing pro- 
cesses — the private purveying of pub- 
lic optimism for gain and the "man- 
ufacture of credi't" for sale; 

Substitute therefor a community 
(national) bookkeeping system, in 
which figures clearly tell what each 
individual and each group has added 
to the common stock. 

(VI) Discard institutions resting 
upon the erroneous notion that con- 
ventional symbols, i. e., "representa- 
tives" of wealth, "bonds," "credit," 
"capital," etc. — are equivalent to and 
can perform the functions of the in- 
strumentalities they "represent," and 
can continue so to function long after 
the instrumentalities have ceased to 
exist or have become obsolete; 

Substitute others making the use- 
rent of things, i. e. "usury," "interest," 
correspond to and be contingent upon 
the effective worth and the continued 
usefulness of the things rented. 

(VII) Discard customs based upon 
mystic symbolism and the animistic 
fallacy that "money" can perform the 
functions of the life-energy or pro- 
ducts "represented"; 

Substitute a costless one-function 
national check medium of exchange. 

(VIII) Discard "business" practices 
based upon the anti-social dictum 
that: "one man's misfortune is an- 
other's opportunity"; 

Substitute therefor the proposition 
that: the illhaps of unavoidable social 
hazards and chance favors of good 
fortune should (in social effect) be 
equally shared by all. 

(IX) Discard all institutions and 
conventions facilitating the function- 
ing of anti-social predatory and para- 
sitic instincts; 

Substitute others tending to en- 
courage willing self-interested co- 
operation energized by national unity 
of purpose. 

_(X) Discard the strife inducing in- 
stitutions of group industries based 
upon the hunger-slavery idea of em- 
ployer and employee organized for 
mechanistic human efficiency in output 
of products for purely private profit; 



TECHNOCRACY 



35 



Subsiilute others based upon ra- 
tional human initiative and develop- 
ment with the aid of all the resources 
of the Nation, co-ordinated for the 
commonweal under the manat^ement 
of Scientific Leadership to accomplish 
a consensus National Objective. 

Save Civilization! 

Whether these proposed cliangcs 
are efTectivcljr workable or are only 
"visionary," "impracticable," "Utopian 
dreams," is, of course, debatable; but 
there can be no question regarding 
the truth of the solemn warning of 
Lloyd George: "Civilization, unless we 
try to save it, may be precipitated 
and scattered to atoms." 

Responsibility. 

That our Civilization is in danger of 
being "shattered to atoms," raises the 
question of culpability for the present 
ominous state of affairs, and hence 
of responsibility for averting the 
threatened outcome. 

The Masses cannot be held respon- 
sible, for they are simply impelled by 
their instinct "to live"; they do not 
think, they do what is much more im- 
portant: they breed. Their magnifi- 
cent all-inclusive social function is re- 
production. Hence, they feel — feel 
hunger, feel passion — they feel with 
all the vital energy of the race. 

Thus, when social conditions be- 
come unbearable or threaten their vital 
function, they reflex with unrestrained 
ferocity against such conventional re- 
straints to the natural expression of 
their instinctive urges. 

The Skilled Artisans cannot be held 
responsible, for they are merely obey- 
ing the instinct "to make." Their 
mental activity is analogous to — and 
for the same social purpose as — the 
cycle of brain functioning that pro- 
duces the mathematical cell of the bee, 
the carpentry of the beaver, and the 
nest building of the bird. 

The Employers cannot be held re- 
sponsible, for they only express the 
instinct "to control," the Mastery in- 
stinct — an urge which could not be 
satisfied unless others willingly sub- 
mitted to domination. Their social 
function is to energize — to counteract 
human inertia — for the preservation 
of the Race. 

The Financiers cannot be held re- 
sponsible, for they only reflex the in- 
stinct "to take," the urge to hoard, 



like — and for the same social pur- 
pose as — the hoarding of the squir- 
rel or the honey storing of the bee. 
They probably are least imaginative 
of all. Their social function is con- 
servation, the converse of progressive 
theorizing. 

Typically, none of these social ele- 
ments think; think in the sense of the 
imaginative pioneer theorizing of cre- 
ative thought — seeking for truth apart 
from its immediate application to self- 
preservation — searching with spiritual 
insight for paths into the unknown to 
be later trod bj^ careless earth-bound 
feet. 

The Scientist is in a different cate- 
gory. Characteristically he lacks the 
instinctive urges which distinguish the 
other elements of human society. 

But, it is his social function to think. 

He does think — he has functioned 
with a vengeance! 

One of the results of his high- 
pressure thinking is that: "Civilization 
may be shattered to atoms" — or Hu- 
manity raised to Godlike heights, by 
Science. 

While it is quite questionable 
whether Science, so far, has proved a 
blessing or a curse to Humanity, 
there can be no doubt that its poten- 
tialities in either direction are limit- 
less. Praiseworthy or culpable, as the 
case now stands, responsibility for the 
outcome rests squarely upon the 
shoulders of the Scientist. 

National Leadership. 

Notwithstanding appearances to the 
contrary — popular unrest, growth of 
socialism, spread of L W. W.-isin, 
the whirlwind of Bolshevism and 
other terrifying upsurgings of de- 
structive Massism — the "Masses" do 
not desire to lead, do not seek "pro- 
letarian dictatorship." 

Human herds have always followed 
leaders, like other gregarious animals* 
followed their leaders willingly, blind- 
ly, thoughtlessly. 

The herd will follow till following 
becomes vitally dangerous, threatens 
its social life — hinders the normal 
functioning of its instinctive urges to 
growth and reproduction. 

Nations have followed the leader- 
ship of Autocracy till starved white 
by plundering conventions or bled 
white by wars. 

Nations have followed the leader- 
ship of Theocratic Mystics into 



36 



TECHNOCRACY 



mental chaos, and confusion of human 
ideals and social purpose. 

And we today, with sheeplike docility, 
have followed Plutocratic leadership 
into a social morass of crazy financial 
conventions, till the raising of families 
has become an unbearable burden, an 
impossible social handicap; till the 
opportunity to work is a dubious 
privilege; till the future of the worker 
and breeder — the proletarian — ofifers 
only a soul shriveling bondage of de- 
basing and inescapable debt! 

Modern Manhood's Mandate. 
The present "World condition" 

means only that the proletariat has 
balked, revolted, at this sordid threat 
to the sanity and the sanctity of 
Human existence. 

The "World condition" is a World 
Cry! — a cry not for Proletarian Dic- 
tatorship, nor for Mob Rule, but tor 
new Leaders. 

The World demands new Leaders! 
Not new and more "efficient" slave 
drivers — Trust Barons, or Kings of 
Commerce, or Emperors of Finance. 

The Modern World demands mod- 
ern Leaders, Men! Men with ideas 
that rise higher than swapping jack- 
knives — even in carload or shipload 
lots. 

The "World condition" expresses 
this demand by modern men for mod- 
ern leaders, leaders with modern spir- 
itualized ideals. 

Our "Social Unrest" is a demand for 
torch-bearers and pathfinders to social 
freedom of opportunity; a demand for 
leaders with luminous imagination to 
visualize our War-born Nation's de- 
sired Peace Goal; leaders with scien- 
tific knowledge to realize and actualize 
the rational aspirations, ambitions, 
and ideals of free modern American 
Manhoood. 

Scientist 

vs. 

Auto-, Thee-, and Pluto-crat 

While the Autocrat, the Theocrat, 
and the Plutocrat, are decadent 
products of outworn ways and obso- 
lescent materialistic manners of think- 
ing, the Scientist, on the contrary, is 
the most modern development of 
modern intelligence, modern ideals, 
and modern spiritualized modes of 
tho.ught. 

The Scientist is essentially a pioneer. 



a pathfinder, a torch bearer, a seeker 
after Truth and Rationality. 

The Scientist is the modern re- 
ligionist, the priest of selfless Truth: 

Truth which grows with Man's 
growth and luminously emerges with 
the purifying of Jiuman Intelligence: 

Truth— that all-inclusive Something 
behind the .^physical facts of nature 
which makes for Right — for mechan- 
ical, for personal, for ethical, for 
spiritual, for social righteousness — the 
ultimate Unifying Ideal. 

Truly, "the stone which the builders 
rejected is become the head of the 
corner": the keystone of the social 
arch. 

Rational Leadership. 

The Scientist is, seemingly, our one 
best, if not our only hope for Rational 
Leadership. 

Then, too, the Scientist — by un- 
leashing the limitlessly powerful nat- 
ural forces, in uncoordinated, haphaz- 
ard science - made instrumentalities — 
has got us into much of our present 
social muddle. 

So it Is up to the Scientist to lead 
us out; or at least, to harness for 
human service the science-created 
non-moral mechanistic monster that 
he has liberated. 

Guideless and Aimless! 

But if the Scientist shirks this great 
task, if he 'lacks the desire for, or 
the courage of, or the will to Leader- 
ship; if for any reason he evades this 
obvious responsibility, or is daunted 
by Its obvious difficulties . . . then 
indeed, blindly plunging deviously on- 
ward — guideless and aimless — "our 
Civilization may be precipitated and 
shattered to atoms," and our Indus- 
trial Democracy adventure prove a 
World Tragedy. 

Yes! the most pathetic of all human 
tragedies — futility. 

Lacking: Purpose. 

Our Nation of great expectations, 
of inagnlficently vague hopes and stu- 
pendous possibilities, (if nothing 
worse happens), will slump Into futile 
pottering desuetude, lacking Inspiring 
purpose to live for, lacking worthy 
achievement to work for, lacking 
worthwhile goal to strive ^r, lacking 
— a. Great National Objective. 



Fernwald, Berkeley, March 20, 1919. 



Reprinted from the Gazette, Berkeley, California. 
Copyright, 1921, by W. H. Smyth 



Technocracy 

Second Series 



PART I. 

Magic Money, Money Magic and the Magician ; 
The Payers and — the Fading Smile. 

By William Henry Smyth 

Note: The First Series of Technocracy outlines a program of social recon- 
struction under the guidance of nationally organized Science. The Second 
Series develops, in simple language and with common examples, the working 
method, the ways and means proposed by the author for attaining such social 
order and contentment, and thus destroying the peril of revolution. 

In Part I Mr. Smyth sets forth the antagonism, in our society, of ancestral 
superstition, obvious in economics, notably effective in finance, as against the 
modern point of view, enforced by Science and our every-day-life familiarity 
with and dependence on machines and machine processes — with the resulting 
social tension accumulating to the breaking strain. — Editor. 



Mechanics and Economics. 

Mechanics deals with things — 
things governed by unchangeable and 
unchanging Laws of Nature. The ba- 
sic facts and principles of Mechanic 
Arts have passed out of the region of 
doubt or controversy — they are firmly 
founded upon the proofs of scientific 
experiment. 

Economics, on the contrary, is con- 
cerned with easily changeable (man- 
made) rules and regulations — commu- 
nity usages intended to facilitate so- 
cial activities. Hardly any two au- 
thorities are agreed upon the basic 
"facts" of economics, nor are these 
"facts" determinable by the tests of 
experimental science. 

Clarity and Obscurity. 

Mechanics and machines, to Mr. Av- 
erage Man, are quite within his com- 
prehension and understandable to or- 
dinary intelligence. 

"Economics" and "Finance," to Mr. 
Average Man, seem realms of pro- 
found impenetrable mystery governed 
by occult forces. 

Important Difference. 

The difference in our mental atti- 
tude towards these two departments 



of human effort, to which I have di- 
rected attention, serves in part at least 
to explain why it is that we would 
unqucstioningly accept (as being bril- 
liantly reasonable) a proposal by a 
"Financier," that with spontaneous 
scorn we would reject (as being ob- 
viously crazy), if suggested by a me- 
chanic. 

It is so easy to overlook the cus- 
tomary that this common happening 
is not commonly noted; nonetheless 
it is a fact and social factor of more 
than ordinary importance, for it 
throws light on social problems, upon 
the solution of which may depend our 
escape, in the United States, from the 
condition of Europe, particularly that 
of Russia. 

"Future Savings." 

Obviously (to commonsense), if 
workers worked in future materials or 
if soldiers shot at each other with fu- 
ture bullets, or if both toilers and 
fighters fed on future food, only vis- 
ionary products and dream carnage 
could result. 

So, should a Mechanic propose to 
us an "invention" intended to enable 
workers, feeders, and fighters to fight 
today, feed today, work today, and 



38 



TECHNOCRACY 



jag toda}' on next year's or next cen- 
tury's materials, food, booze, and en- 
ergy; we should tap our foreheads 
significantly, and niunnur — "Wheels!" 

Let, however, Mr. Financier make 
the same proposition as Mr. (Nuttie) 
Mechanic, and we joyfully shout — 
"Hurrah! for the Future!"; and hand 
our "Wizard of Finance" a thousand 
billion dollar blanket mortgage "bond" 
on the world, (i. e., "National Debts," 
and intra-national "credit" instru- 
ments) paying Financier 5% interest 
for ever — to "finance the enterprise." 

When a dapper and dextrous gen- 
tleman, in evening costume — with con- 
vincing evidence of "no deception" — 
produces ribbons and rabbits, pigeons 
and poultry, guinea-pigs and goldfish, 
from a magic hat. we — imdeceived — 
smilingly applaud his skill. 

But, let Mr. Financier's learned co- 
adjutor Professor Economicus solemn- 
ly and lengthily discourse Icarncdh' 
regarding steaks and steamships; su- 
gar, shoes and psychics: copper and 
coal; jags, joys and jimjams; cotton, 
coaloil, and cucumbers; cabbages and 
kings, dollars and diamonds, quantum 
and quahogs — all that heart of man 
desires — spontaneously generated out 
of a magic hat of "future savings" 
(i. e.. mysteriously conventionalized 
"credit"), we listen in respectful 
amaze, and hopefully hand our petty 
surplus present products to Mr. Finan- 
cier — as a small consideration for the 
great and mysterious future benefits 
to be conferred by his wondrous cre- 
ative art! 

Such "finance" and "economic" hap- 
penings as these are so common, 
usual, everyday experiences that they 
pass smoothly by without any awak- 
ening shock to our intelligence; thus 
they escape critical attention. None- 
theless from these casual unnoted 
causes flow our social unrest and 
world-conflict. 

Magic Money. 

(a) "This war must be financed, not 
out of past savings but out of future 
savings. Future savings are for the 
moment not available and some other 
device must therefore be brought into 
play. That device is bank credit, and 
this loan and subsequent loans will in 



the main be floated tlirough an expan- 
sion of bank credit." 

Money Magic. 

(b) "And, finally, it flows in to the 
capitalist without ever exhausting the 
capital from which it comes, and there- 
fore without any necessary limit to its 
continuance. It is, if one may use 
such an expression about mundane 
things, capable of an everlasting life. 
Thus it is that the phenomenon of in- 
terest as a whole presents the remark- 
able picture of a lifeless thing produc- 
ing an everlasting and inexhaustible 
supply of goods." 

"Economics" vs. Horsesense. 

Quotation (a) is the considered pro- 
nouncement of a foremost banker and 
a national power in the "World of 
Finance." 

Quotation (b) is the deliberate ut- 
terance of a leading if not the leading 
authority in the "Realm of Econom- 
ics." 

Both statements, with practical 
unanimity, arc accepted as expressions 
of Twentieth Ccnturj' economic intelli- 
gence. 

If quotation (a) is not in essence 
precisely the proposal of our crazy "in- 
ventor" and if (b) does not in effect 
describe the performance of the presti- 
digitator, and if both are not definite 
and serious expressions of (real even 
if unconscious) belief in magic, then 
words have no meaning and rational 
thought is a futile farce. 

Should either proposition (a or b) 
come (in precisely the same form) 
from a mechanic, it would require no 
stretch of the imagination to foretell 
the verdict of a lunacy commission 
regarding his fate. 

Modern Diabolism. 

It is noteworthy that our mental 
attitude toward the Mechanic is prac- 
tical, matter-of-fact, modern; toward 
the Financier it is "natural," sub- 
conscious, and old as the human race. 

In this first quarter of the Twen- 
tieth Century, the overwhelming 
majority still persist in our ages-old 
belief in supernatural outcomes — 
something from nothing. Indeed, it 
is probable that not one of us is 
quite liberated from the ancient thrall 



TECHNOCRACY 



39 



of superstition in some of its myriad 
aspects. So deeply ingrained in the 
fiber of human thought is the idea 
of magic causation, that this is still 
the "natural" explanation of any 
strange happening. 

Our common speech, our vocations, 
relaxations, institutions, (secular and 
sacred), are full to overflowing with 
evidence to the persistance of prac- 
tically universal belief in sorcery, de- 
monology, witchcraft, black-art and 
magic. 

We legalize "chance" for the dis- 
tribution of wealth, for the "owner- 
ship" of property, and for success 
in life. 

We commercialize and institu- 
tionalize luck, gambling, speculation 
— socialize worship of the "fickle god- 
dess." 

We pray "God" to pet and coddle 
us, and we bribe "Him" to clout 
without mercy those of whom we 
disapprove. 

We supplicate rain for our little 
alfalfa patch — regardless of ovu^ 
neighbor's blossoming orchard. 

We "bless" our friends politely, 
and "curse" our enemies with pro- 
fuse elaboration. 

We have sanctified days, places, 
and things, not forgetting a fair- 
sized remnant of super-sanctified peo- 
ple. 

We habitually apply the term "wiz- 
ard" to every man who produces 
results that arouse our wonder — - 
Wizard of Invention, Wizard of Art, 
Wizard of Finance. 

We constantly talk of the Alagic 
of invention, the Magic of art, the 
Magic of money. 

Still we ignore these facts and 
pretend that the modern use of hoary 
old witchcraft words is metaphorical, 
and that our continued use of Black 
Art and White Magic customs docs 
not imply belief in Diabolism and 
necromancy as in the past. 

But association of ideas, race his- 
tory, nursery impressions, and com- 
munity heritage are all too strong for 
the strongest of us, so the best we at- 
tain is verbal and vociferous denial 
thinly and shamefacedly masking con- 
scious, subconscious, and unconscious 
belief in magic. 



Two Ways of Thinking. 

Add now the new factors. Modern 
Science and Printing. — with the con- 
comitant spread of scientific thinking 
— which knows not, repudiates, and 
wars with mystery, occultism, magic — 
and Ave have the perfectly natural re- 
sults which we see all around us: dis- 
agreements, disputes, strikes, lock- 
outs, riots, I. W. W.-ism, Bolshevism, 
revolutions, rebellions. World War; 
results the final outcome of which — 
depending upon general human intel- 
ligence — will make for unprecedented 
social progress or for anarchy and 
the downfall of present civilization. 

Mechanics, Modern Science and sci- 
entific mode of thinking practically be- 
gan with the Steam Engine and mod- 
ern machines of precision. 

Ecoromics is coeval v.ilh the Hu- 
man Race. 

So it has come about that each one 
of us has two separate sets of ider\s, 
two distinct ways of thinking — the 
Ancient aftd the Modern. 

Truth Resented. 

Even so, a statement that our (more 
or less) self-consistent "Financial Sys- 
tem" is to any serious extent con- 
structed out of unscientific fancies and 
rests upon nothing more solid than 
ancient superstition, is a shock to van- 
ity, as an insult to our intelligence: an 
insult directed not at the ignorant 
amon*- us or at the thoughtless ordin- 
ary citizen, but, at our leaders and our 
teachers, and at the "brilliant intel- 
lects" that control the world's activ- 
ities — the Premiers of Governments, 
the Kings of Commerce, the Emper- 
ors of Finance. 

Nonetheless, I believe the accusa- 
tion to be substantially true. 

For a Consideration. 

Under our modern business usages 
and economic customs, all social ac- 
tivities nuist be "financed"; every hu- 
man purpose from "winning souls to 
God" to building a toboggan slide hell- 
ward; from constructing a "little red 
schoolhouse" to destroying an empire; 
from horning to burying, every human 
enterprise must (as a matter of 
course), be "financed" — for a consid- 
eration. 

In brief, the modern fashion in 



40 



TECHNOCRACY 



smoothly separating Doer and Maker 
from the desirable results of his doi?Tg 
and making, is by "financiering the 
enterprise"— for a consideration. 

For a thousand years prior to our 
"Finance" dispensation, human activi- 
ties and enterprises had to be (similar- 
ly) sanctioned by "the Church" — for a 
consideration. 

For a thousand years or more, prior 
to "the Church," enterprises liad to 
be similarly sanctioned by "the Or- 
acle" — for a consideration. 

Fashions change, but human nature 
is more unchanging than the granite 
cliffs; and the art of painlessly part- 
ing producer from his products is as 
old as civilization and — Magic still is, 
as it ahvajrs has been, the painless 
parter's most effective "device." 

Indeed, the art of separating the 
worker from the results of his indus- 
try is far older than the human race: 
animals swipe their neiglibors' hoards, 
bears steal honey, and bee swarms rob 
each other. 

Aeons of time and ages of human 
experience have not resulted in any 
essential change in purpose and out- 
come, but only in rendering the pro- 
cess more workmanlike and less 
messy. 

Animism in "Economics." 

A common feature in systems of 
magic is animism — attril)uting to in- 
animate objects the functions of life, 
assuming things to possess will, pur- 
pose, and power. 

It is significant (though quite in 
keeping) that "Economists" and "Fi- 
nanciers" have this characteristic at- 
titude of mind towards, and employ 
animistic forms of expression in writ- 
ing and talking about "Money" and 
"Capital." 

Whether this is due to unconscious 
belief in magic or is mere metaphor, 
the result, in either case, is befogging 
confusion of thought. 

When the President of a great 
banking corporation, in a serious pub- 
lic discussion on "War Taxation," for 
example, says: 

"Capital has a long memory . . . "; 

"Capital is proverbially timid . . ."; 

". . . treason for capital and capi- 
talists . . . ": 



"... capital and men of enter- 
prise . . . "; 

"... capital and capitalists of to- 
day . . . "; 

he seems to be expressing nonsensical 
animism and belief in magic: — magic 
no less crude and thinking no less na- 
ive and childlike than that of the av- 
erage man-on-thc-street in his oft- 
stated conviction that "Money makes 
mone}"," that "Dimes breed dollars," 
and suchlike popular aphorisms. 

Hazy verbal expression usually im- 
plies fogg}^ thinking, and this is as 
true of the "highbrow" as of the rest 
of us. When language fails to clarify 
thought it is probable that the 
thoughts of its user need clarifying. 

Interpretation. 

Let us then (by means of a little 
paraphrastic amplification), endeavor 
to make clear just what our banker 
friend and adviser is really implying 
in these truly car-catching phrases, 
which sound as though they really 
ought to mean something: 

Capital (i. e. a spade, or a plow, or 
a crowbar, is more favorably en- 
dowed than many of the human users 
thereof — it) has a long memory . . . 

Capital (i. e. a railroad, or a steam- 
ship, or a skyscraper is scared to be 
out alone after dark — it) is prover- 
bially timid . . . 

(It is) treason for capital (i. e. 
boilers and bullion, timber-land and 
mineral deposits, wharves and ware- 
houses to preach and practice the forc- 
ible overthrow of our governinent) 
and (likewise also for) capitalists 
(when either capital or capitalist is 
caught in the act, he, she or it should 
be shot, or at least fed on low diet 
in close confinement until repent- 
ant) . . . 

Capital and capitalists of today, (on 
account of their like human attrib- 
utes, should be treated with all due 
and tender consideration of their like 
human frailties and timid self-sacri- 
ficing characteristics) . . . 

I wonder if this is precisely what 
friend Banker intended to imply, and 
us to understand him to mean. 

"Economic" Abracadabra. 

The literature of Wizardry — and it 
is amazingly voluminous — is charac- 



TECHNOCRACY 



41 



terizcd, both in word and in thought, 
by mind-racking unintelHgible obscur- 
ity. It is curiously significant that 
the books devoted to modern Econom- 
ics and Finance are likewise couched 
in obscure jargon — abracadabra — not 
only meaningless to ordinary intel- 
ligence, but apparently also to the 
adepts in the alleged arts. 

Here are a few samples culled at 
random from a page in an article on 
"The Nature and Mechanism (!) of 
Credit," appearing in the Quarterly 
Journal of Economics: 

"... subjective value objecti- 
vised . . ."; 

"... force of value . . ."; 

"... psychic force . . ."; 

". . . generic purchasing power 



good 



for 
of 



future 
future 



' . . . present 
good . . ."; 

"... iircsent 
industrial worth ...'"; 
and the list might be almost indefi- 
nitely extended. 

Truly, I do not lack courage, but 
I throw up my hands — confronted by 
these weirdly mystic phrases! 

To me they seem as essentially 
meaningless as the twaddle of the 
March Hare and the Hatter that so 
puzzled poor Alice — in Wonderland. 
Subjected to mere commonsensc an- 
alysis not one of these mysteriously 
cabalistic phrases seems to have any 
more meaning, or to have any more 
relation to actual things in a work-a- 
day world of Science and Mechanics, 
tlian the amazingly similar jargon of 
Wizardry. 

Kilkenny Cats. 

Practically every "Economist" writ- 
er invents his own vocabulary, and 
contradicts the stateinents of every 
other; they ridicule each other's rea- 
soning; and seemingly each denies the 
validity of all economic axioms but 
his own — they fight like Kilkenny 
Cats. 

A hurricane of verbalization has 
yowled and a flood of billingsgate has 
raged in this tempestuously wordy 
conflict of economic mysticism. Bank- 
ers fljitly contradict Bankers; and 
Economists arrive at diametrically op- 
posite conclusions — from the same 
"facts." 



In no other department of human 
thought is there so much discord and 
confusion as in the "Science of Eco- 
nomics." 

But . . . ! the Financier — gets there 
just the same. 

Fact and Fancy. 

It is practically certain that none 
of us knows v.hen or to what extent 
superstition, ignorant mysticism and 
animistic fallacies color and vitiate 
his otherwise rational thinking. It 
should not surprise us therefore, to 
find whole areas of activities still ob- 
sessed with this primitive mode of 
tliought, nor that the actors therein 
are unconscious of their mental state. 

Would it not be the greatest miracle 
of all were it otherwise? 

Thus it is in high degree probable 
that old fallacies and superstitions still 
infest and ramify (unsuspected) those 
activities which deal with life in its 
more than ordinary complex aspects — 
religion, philosophy, government, fin- 
ance. 

These considerations (even without 
taking into account the ever-present 
factor of instinctive self-interest) suf- 
fice to make probability verge on cer- 
tainty, that all these departments of 
human activity involve an inextricable 
mingling of fact and fancy — science 
and superstition. 

War. 

Magic and Science — "Economics" 
and Mechanics — no contrast could be 
greater, no antithesis more complete; 
and between magic and science there 
nuist always be war. 

Just as the World War — with all its 
variety of aspects and complexities of 
motives — expresses the inherent con- 
flict between mutually exclusive and 
antagonistic social systems — ancient 
Autocracy and modern Democracy — 
so the world-wide social strife, indus- 
trial unrest, I. W. W.-ism, Bolshe- 
vism and other disruptive massisms, 
express, in last analysis the still more 
profound and equally unescapable con- 
flict between ancient Superstition and 
modern Science. 

Mumbo Jumbo. 
One of the commonest of human er- 
rors is that of mentally putting the 
cart before the horse — mistaking the 



42 



TECHNOCRACY 



effect for the cause and vice versa. 
We all reason more or less childishly, 
impressed by the obvious. 

In our childhood's games, custom 
(hoary with age) prescribes concur- 
rent forms of senseless words and ir- 
relevant acts, words and acts to which 
we ascribe such causative effect in the 
outcome that, to our childish minds, 
the game would be impossible without 
their magic. 

So, too, it is much the same \\-th 
us, as grownups. 

In our social activities, '".ustom 
(hoary with age and saturated with 
ancient superstitions) prescribes the 
mumbo jumbo we now call "financing 
the enterprise." And to our obsessed 
minds this voodoo becomes an all-im- 
portant factor of such causative effect 
that without its potent magic it would 
be unsafe, if not impossible, to build 
a schoolhouse or wage a war. 

Pedigree. 

We see with our eyes the obvious 
fact that "financing" precedes and 
accompanies all undertakings and en- 
terprises; we see with our eyes that 
doings, and makings, and enterprises 
grow apace and increase most inar- 
vclously, so — "naturally" — we ascribe 
to the "Financier" a large measure 
of effect in the outcome. 

And the source of the financier's 
power to do these "miracles" and 
work these wonders being mysterious 
and occult, we "naturally" concede 
him a large share of the proceeds, 
and we (equally naturally) accord to 
our modern Wizard (of "Finance") 
that respectful awe v;hich in all past 
times we have been accustomed to 
render to his forebears and predeces- 
sors in magic — the Medicine Man, 
the Witch Doctor, the Soothsayer, 
the Oracle, the Astrologer, the Ma- 
gician, the Ecclesiastic. 

Custom and usage is merely con- 
tinuing its normal coiu-se in those 
two realms of activity now called 
Finance, and Productive Industry — 
Capital and Labor. 

D-e-b-t Spells Slavery. 

Enterprises (whether constrtictive 
or destructive, Avhether productive or 
unproductive, whether of peace or of 
war), when "financed," become in- 



debted to the "Financier" in propor- 
tion to their magnitude; hence, the 
liarder the worker works, the more 
industrious and enterprising the 
Worker Community, the faster and 
greater grows the Community indebt- 
edness — a truly quaint, queer, curious 
and mysterious system of "econom- 
ics"! 

And the more closely it is exam- 
ined the more quaintly mysterious it 
seems. 

Mystery is and always has been 
the "device" of the cunning to de- 
spoil and enslave the simple; and no 
fact of large social significance is 
today more glaringly apparent than 
the general and mysterious drift of 
desirable things out of the hands of 
those who make them into the con- 
trol of others. 

Equally clear is it that the motor 
"device" in this drift, taken by-and- 
large, is that mysterious process we 
call "financing the enterprise"; and 
by the same token its most efficient 
instrumentality is magic money and 
money magic. 

It is not necessary to assume con- 
scious intent on the part of the 
"Financier" to enslave the "Worker 
Masses", still, in a practical world it 
is the practical outcome not the in- 
tent that is of practical importance; 
and in the orthography of modern 
economics "slavery" is spelled with 
only four letters — D-E-B-T. 

The Magic Hat. 

As — "economically" (!)— debt im- 
plies interest "which flows to the 
capitalist without ever exhausting the 
capital from which it comes and 
therefore without any necessary limit 
to its continuance, it is . . . ca- 
pable of an everlasting life . . . 
a lifeless thing producing an ever- 
lasting and Inexhaustible supply of 
goods" — steaks and steamships, welsh- 
rabbits and railroads, women and 
wine, dinners and diamonds, farms 
and factories; parks, palaces, pleas- 
ures, power — leisure and luxury, and 
all that lustful heart of man desires, 
all flowing in an everlasting, self- 
creating stream, not out of btit into 
the magic hat — of the smiling finan- 
cial prestidigitator. 

But . . . ! the responsive smile 



TECHNOCRACY 



43 



is ominously fading from the faces 
of the dazed payers of the perform- 
ance, gazing in goggle-eyed perplex- 
ity at this quaint inversion of the 
familiar old magic-hat trick. 

Who? and What? 

Who are they from whose faces 
the smile is so ominously fading? 

What docs the fading of the smile 
mean? 

What does it portend? 

They — are "the people." 

Of them I have written heretofore: 
"They do not think (constructively) 
. . . they feel — feel hunger, feel 
passion — they feel with all the vital 
energy of the race. Thus when so- 
cial conditions become unbearable or 
threaten their vital function (repro- 
duction), they reflex with unre- 
strained ferocity. ..." 

That is what it means — the fading 
of the smile. 

What it portends is — Revolution. 

Question! 

Is that — even as only a possibility 



— a wortliwhile social outcome, con- 
sidering our stupendous National op- 
portunity? 

Is our present social condition one 
to which we can justly point with 
National pride? 

Is our present social condition 
worthy of National self-praise or of 
self-condemnation when we think of 
our century of nationally unhampered 
freedom and consider our vast con- 
tinental area of the most fertile, the 
most resourceful, and most favorably 
situated land and — the most intelli- 
gent mass of human kind on earth, 
on the job? 

Is our present social condition a 
goal for which an intelligent healthy- 
minded Nation would deliberately 
strive? 

Is our present social condition the 
Objective for which we — as a Na- 
tion — have deliberately striven dur- 
ing our National life? 

What is — now — our National Ob- 
jective? 



Fcrnwald, Berkeley, California. 
November 5, 1920. 



ANIMALS REPRODUCE THEIR KIND: 
CAN "MONEY MAKE MONEY"? 



Technocracy 

Second Series ^ 

PART II. 

The Method of Solving Problems Generally 
And Our Social Problem in Particular. 

.By William Henry Smyth 

Note: Part II of Technocracy — Second Series makes easily and clearly 
understandable a method of solving problems by disregarding details (ac- 
cidentals) and focusing on principles (essentials), and the peculiar applicability 
of this method to the social problems. 

In so applying it, it is shown that social forces and (human) materials 
are nature-given — unchangeable — and act in obedience to laws of nature 
(instinctive urges, etc.), but by the same method by which the mechanic 
utilizes "destructive" natural forces to subserve his human purposes, attains 
his ends, and prevents disaster, we may (and not otherwise) avoid impending 
social calamity — forestall revolution. 



Freedom of Choice. 

Nations, like individuals, have free- 
dom of choice to do well or ill — to act 
wisely or otherwise. 

Nations, like their human elements, 
are subject to growth, to degeneration, 
to catastrophe. They are subject, 
in other words, to evolution, devolu- 
tion, revolution. 

And, as in the case of individuals, 
their growth, health, freedom from 
accident — their continued prosperity — 
depends upon their knowledge of the 
laws of Nature and the intelligent use 
they make of thi's knowledge. 

"Great" and "Small." 

Seemingly "Nature" makes no more 
distinction between nations and indi- 
viduals — is no more considerate of 
millions than of units, than we arc, 
toward an ant or a swarm of ants. 

Indeed, in the midst of the bil- 
lions of giant suns constituting our 
"Universe" the significance of our 
whole huge Earth and all its con- 
tents, animate, and inanimate, seems 
to shrink into absolute negligibility. 

But, "great" and "small" are human 
notions. 

"Nature" is just as "great" in its 
smallest parts as it is "small" in its 
greatest. And it is human Intelligence 
which comprehends both the greatness 
of the telescopic universe of suns and 



solar systems, and the equal greatness 
of the microscopic "universe" of mole- 
cules and sub-molecules that make 
up a grain of sand. 

Responsibility. 

The practical point of this more or 
less philosophical introduction is that 
we humans find ourselves on a mag- 
nificently equipped earth, endowed 
with freedom of choice to use or abuse 
our splendid opportunities, with the 
inevitable alternative of sanely joyous 
life or futily premature death. And 
we of the United States hold the most 
favorable portion of tlie globe and an 
unequalled physical and spiritual heri- 
tage, with corresponding magnitude 
of responsibilit}'; responsibility flow- 
ing from and out of our God-given and 
God-like freedom of choice. 

Intelligence. 

It is not necessary (as is both cus- 
tomary and confusing) to read "pur- 
pose" into the "acts of Nature." It 
is enough to discern their unmistak- 
ably marked drift. 

This drift is a datum — a basic fact — 
that willy-nilly we must accept. 

It is this drift we call Evolution. 

But there is this distinction between 
Man and "Nature": Nature is imper- 
sonal, mechanistic; Man is endowed 
with Personality — intelligence and 



TFXHKOCRACY 



45 



freedom of choice; and is tliercby en- 
abled to become an active and pur- 
poseful participator in the processes of 
evolution, and by judiciously selecting 
his relation to the drift he becomes 
the sole responsible arbiter of his fate 
— the master of his destiny. 

Perplexity. 

But, can man's finite mind really 
discern and steer a certain course 
among the infinite complexities of the 
Universe? 

Why not? 

The difficulty is not nearly so great 
as many think. For every complexity 
is reducible to simplicity. 

Perhaps you have recently visited 
the California, one of our latest fight- 
ing ships. And being neither a naval 
man nor a mechanic, what you saw 
was probably a seemingly unintellig- 
ible and mind confusing mass of com- 
plexities, filling you with -wonder, but 
also with helpless bewilderment. 

Principles. 

But, looked at the right way, the 
battleship would have been as easy 
reading as this sentence is to you. You 
would have automatically looked for 
the very few essential ideas — princi- 
ples — upon which every mechanism 
and every combination of mechanisms 
must be built; and these perceived, 
the rest would have been as simple 
as unrolling a ball of twine; for, after 
all, what you saw was only a dug-out 
with cobble-stones to throw at the 
enemy — modernized. 

Complex Machinery? 

You know that the battleship hull is 
merely a large floating sharp-ended 
box or shell. You know that it has 
motor means to give it motion; steer- 
ing means to give it direction; arma- 
ment to give, it fighting efficiency. 

These simple essential elements 
equally characterize the primordial 
savage war-canoe and the modern civ- 
ilized battleship; and so considered 
one is no more bewildering than the 
other. And both are equally within 
the grasp of common-sense clear and 
ordered comprehension. 

As to the myriad minute details, by 
which these simple elements have 
gradually attained their modern re- 



finement, these are matters of merely 
incidental interest; each one of which 
complexities, however, could be re- 
duced to the same simplicity separ- 
ately — by the same method. 

Indeed, these separate elements con- 
stitute subject matters of separate 
arts, and they have been arrived at by 
the skilled mechanic by a process es- 
sentially corresponding to that which 
I have suggested to you, as the right 
way of looking at the battleship. 

Fictitious Complexity. 

" The Mechanic knows no more about 
the ultimate nature (i. e. details) of 
the matter, materials, and forces 
which he employs, than you knew 
about the details of a fighting craft. 

All he knows or cares about are a 
few basic facts, the simple principles 
(elements) of Mechanics, and he pro- 
duces his results, so bewildering to 
you in their fictitious complexity, by 
applying these simple principles to 
whatever task he tackles. 

Experience. 

You will not charge me with ego- 
tism if I remind you that I am talk- 
ing as one who has been there. 

In my long experience as inventor, 
as inventor's adviser, as expert in a 
multitude of technical questions and 
patent litigations involving matters 
of the most intricate character, I 
have never found my method of lay- 
ing hold of the principles to fail; and 
I have never encountered another 
that will work. 

Method. 

Now this method, though unfor- 
tunately far from universally prac- 
ticed, is quite universally available. 

There is no reason in the world 
why you should not employ it as 
well, and with the same confidence, 
as I. For it rests, not upon a spe- 
cial endowment or any particular at- 
tainment, but on the commonsense 
discernment that every effect has a 
cause, and that at the bottom of a 
cluster of interrelated effects one 
must reach a simple cause. 

Universal Applicability. 

This effective method of attack is 
seemingly of universal applicability. 



46 



TECHNOCRACY 



and 3'ou should now be able to rec- 
ognize its use by me in the various 
articles of mine that you have read. 
You may also fathom the cause and 
foundation of the seemingly egotis- 
tical confidence with which I, a 
mere mechanic, plunge headlong into 
the all-but-sacrcd-and-awe-inspiring 
region of Sociology, Economics, and 
Finance — and unhesitatingly invite 
you to follow me. 

The method has in the past en- 
abled me to successfully pioneer in 
quite a number of arts in the details 
of which I was as ignorant as I ani 
of those of Economics and Finance. 
Thus I do not feel that I am sug- 
gesting to you a course fraught with 
any more danger than that normal 
to being alive; either when I recom- 
mend your adoption of my method 
of attacking problems generally or in 
my asking you to follow me in my 
application of it to our "Social Prob- 
lem". 

Why Pessimistic? 

You will remember that the first 
part of this series ended somewhat 
pessimistically envisaging an ominous 
prospect and causative influences 
seemingly dcCp-seated and running 
back into the mists of antiquity. The 
great mass of the peopiie are becom- 
ing more and more discontented with 
their condition, more and more per- 
plexed concerning its cause, and more 
and more bewildered (and increas- 
ingly impatient) as to the course to 
be pursued. 

To all with eyes to see it is clear 
that the social body is profoundly 
sick. And equally clear, that to cure 
a sickness, one must remove the 
cause; and that unless the cause is 
so removed, the sickness will run its 
course — possibly to death. 

Forestall Revolution. 

In the social body, when the 
process of sickness (such as we are 
now passing through) reaches a crit- 
ical point, another phase or phe- 
nomenon usually supervenes to save 
the moribund body from actual ex- 
tinction: Revolution. 

And just as it is the task of a sick 
man to fight off death, so our social 



problem, in its essence, is the task 
of forestalling Revolution. 

Remember the California. 

With our visit to the warship in 
mind, let us now prepare to apply 
to our Social Problem the method 
there tried out. 

We must first of all ascertain and 
grasp securely the simple basic prin- 
ciples on which the mechanism of 
the social body is built. This will 
carry us out of the maze of confus- 
ing details into the clearness of or- 
dered comprehension. 

We shall then be in a position to 
make an intelligent diagnosis of the 
social disorder, and to at least think 
clearly regarding the remedial course 
to be adopted. 

And, lest there be needless appre- 
hension, let us note right here that 
it will not be necessary for us to 
lay down the curative (or recon- 
structive) procedure in its particu- 
lars — "a practical remedy" in detail. 
Just as on the battleship we sliould 
find experts competent to execute 
the details of any change found de- 
sirable, so we have in the social ag- 
gregation technicians to perform the 
corresponding tasks. 

What Evolution Is Not. 

No word is more on people's lips 
than "Evolution"; and none is more 
frequently misused, and misunder- 
stood. 

Social Evolution is often talked of 
as if it were a cosmic process forced 
on men wholly from the outside, re- 
gardless of their yea and nay; or 
again as if it were a beneficent dis- 
pensation "from on high" that some- 
how, and regardless of men's acts, 
will float them to the haven of social 
bliss. 

The typical expression of this 
last extraordinary misconception is: 
"Things will right themselves!" 

What Evolution Is. 

In so far as "Social Evolution" is 
used not merely as a pretentious 
label for any adventitious change, 
but for a continuing process analo- 
gous to that which has produced the 
animate world, from amoeba to Man, 
Social Evolution is indeed a "Nat- 



TECHNOCRACY 



47 



ural'' force which Man must accept 
and to which he must adjust him- 
self as to all other forces of Nature, 
but which, like any other natural 
force, is available to Man for the 
accomplishment of his own purposes. 
Thus — and this is the decisive point 
— Man is not the helpless object of 
this evolutionary force, but a par- 
ticipating subject — a Master ^^le- 
chanic. 

Man's Will. 

It is nonsense to say Capitalism 
must persist or that Socialism must 
come, by virtue of social evolution, 
whether men desire either one or the 
other or neither. Men in their social 
relations are not dust motes blown 
hither and thither by evolutionary 
winds. Men are intelligent beings, 
with freedom of choice; that is, free 
to use their intelligence. 

Use their intelligence for what? 

Obviously not for the purpose of 
trying to re-make Man — to treat as 
negligible basic traits fixed by suc- 
cessive survival through a million 
generations; or of attempting to alter 
the eternal forces of Nature. 

That were vain indeed! 

Natural forces, in social as well as 
in molecular and molar mechanics, 
in social as well as in biological evo- 
lution, are inexorable. They are not 
hostile to Man, neither are they 
friendly; they are simply regardless 
of him — impersonal. 

If they have any "will", they show 
none toward Man. 

But Man has will. Man has pur- 
pose. 

Man can! — if he will. . . 

Man's Way, 

How then does Man do his will, 
work his purpose? 

To him who tries to see below the 
surface it is clear that purposeful 
action invariably is pivoted on a ju- 
dicious choice of the inan's position 
in relation to the circumstances which 
he confronts. 

This is true even of the trite con- 
ditions of bur daily lives: even these 
are usually determined for us. Our 
real freedom of action means our 
choice of different ways of placing 
ourselves in relation to these con- 



ditions — as a sailor, to keep his de- 
sired course, sets his sail with ref- 
erence to the wind. 

Choice of Relation. 

It is even so with the greatest 
aft'airs, with the concerns of the Na- 
tion, with our whole Social Problem. 

Certain forces face and envelop us 
that we cannot change. But we can 
set our social sails and order our 
actions in relation to them and thus 
mediately affect the course of our 
social craft in the direction of a hu- 
manly desirable, predetermined goal. 

If our choice is unwise, those 
forces will run to our hurt. If we 
choose wisely, we may make a force 
seemingly opposed to our aim — sub- 
serve it. Thus we can convert what 
otherwise would have led to destruc- 
tion into constructive upbuilding — 
change malefaction into benefaction, 
criminality into social service, gen- 
eral nui/ance into commonweal. 

Preventable Calamities. 

Think of the Johnstown flood, the 
San Francisco fire, the Titanic dis- 
aster, the frequent destructive over- 
flow of the Mississippi, the recurring 
inundations of the Sacramento Val- 
ley. 

All these represent Nature acting 
regardless of Man; and Man acting 
regardless of his own intelligence. 

In all these cases natural forces 
overwhelmed Man with calamity be- 
cause he had failed to exercise his 
intelligence in rightly choosing his 
relation toward these forces. 

After Event Wisdom. 

After the destruction of Johns- 
town, the seasonal floodwaters were 
wisely impounded — to prevent a repe- 
tition of the disaster. 

After the San Francisco fire, build- 
ings were wisely constructed of steel 
and concrete and an adequate water 
supply provided — to prevent a repe- 
tition of the disaster. 

After the Titanic and her human- 
cargo had perished, her sister ship 
was wisely fitted with a double cel- 
lular bottom, and other provisions — 
to prevent a repetition of the dis- 
aster. 

After seasonal floods of Sierra 



48 



TECHNOCRACY 



snow waters have, time and again, 
destroyed, wholesale, men's works 
and the products of their industry, 
engineering measures iare contem- 
plated in our great vallej^ — to prevent 
the recurring disasters. 

Why Not Before? 

The Johnstown people knew their 
danger from flood! 

The San Franciscans knew their 
peculiar danger from fire! 

The owners of the Titanic knew 
the danger from icebergs! 

And all of us in the United States 
now — except those deliberately ob- 
structing their mental vision with 
blinkers of happy-go-lucky optimism 
— realize our impending danger from 
Revolution. 

There is nothing so foolish and 
ultimately disastrous as to blink un- 
pleasant facts; "saying peace, peace: 
when there is no peace." 

This blinking of facts — "trusting 
to luck", trusting that "things will 
right themselves" — is the true cause 
of disaster. 

Shall we of the United States act 
like those foolish ones and like them 
suflfer for our foolishness? 

Shall we continue to act with 
enual foolishness and enact silly "pro- 
hibition" and other repressive laws 
intended to accomplish the impos- 
sible — change fundamental human in- 
stincts and overturn the unalterable 
laws of Nature? 

Shall we, like Europe, wait to learn 
wisdom from social catastrophe — 
revolution? 

I hope not. 

Ways and Means. 

My hope that wc shall forestall rev- 
olution will undoubtedly be echoed by 
all true Americans. 

But that our hope may be fulfilled, 
we cannot trust to luck or that things 
will right themselves. 

It will be necessary above all that 
we act, and not only act, but act 
intelligently. And we seem, as yet, 
far from anything like a general un- 
derstanding and agreement as to 
what must be done and what can be 
done. 

We cannot (and we would not if we 
could) prevent the snow falling on the 



Sierras. We cannot prevent that 
snow from melting when and how fast 
it will. No matter how much we 
may prefer a nicely and "benevolent- 
ly" calculated graduation, we cannot 
prevent a sudden and "malevolently" 
unseasonable rise of temperature and 
sudden starting of a thousand "dev- 
ilishly" destructive freshets. 

Adjust Ourselves. 

But we can protect the forests, im- 
pound flood waters, regulate stream 
channels, build reservoirs, dams and 
levees. In short, we can forestall 
destruction flowing from impersonally- 
neutral natural forces, which in them- 
selves aie unpreventable. 

Every one knows how much in that 
way we have already accomplished, 
and how much more is planned. 

We are not, however, confined to 
prevention. Flood waters, which 
would devastate, can be (and, as well 
known, are) turned into priceless 
means of production. By intelligence 
and skill and purposefulncss they are 
made the means of reclaiming for 
man's use the desert, and of "gener- 
ating" light and power, and of helping 
to build up what may, and what many 
of us loyal Californians firmly believe 
will, become the apex of human cul- 
ture, the highest and truest civiliza- 
tion on earth. 

Immutable Nature. 

The point of application is plain. 
There are about us social forces that 
in themselves are just as little under 
our control as are the snow fall and 
thaw. Left to themselves they must 
run their "natural" course. And, like 
as not before we have time to catch 
our breath, the flood will be upon us; 
that direst deluge of all — Revolution. 

We cannot change the elemental 
facts of human nature. 

Unchangeable Types. 

In the first part of the first series 
of these Technocracy papers I have 
sketched in outline the origin and de- 
velopment of the primal instincts and 
propensities. These are as fixed as 
natural forces. They aic, mdced, nat- 
ural forces. 

We cannot change a bellicose man 
into a pacifist — a Roosevelt into a 



TECHNOCRACY 



49 



Wilson; nor a feeder and breeder into 
a philosopher; nor the acquisitive in- 
to the inventive. We cannot by any 
direct act abolish or even change sel- 
fishness, cunning, greed, cowardice, 
just as little as it would avail to try 
(and it has been tried) to eradicate 
courage, generosity, industry, public 
spirit. 

Human Material. 

To the social philosopher and the 
enlightened social reformer, and best 
of all to the plain citizen taking 
thought of these matters, the first step 
in the right direction, the first basic 
principle that must underlie an under- 
standing of the present Social Dis- 
order and be imbedded in the founda- 
tion of the Social Order to come, 
should be the real and efifective recog- 
nition that all that may be accom- 
plished must be accomplished with 
the existing human material. 

Not Angels. 

There is nothing in this proposition 
to cause dejection to any one except 
to those who think our only salva- 
tion lies in our acquiring halos and 
growing wings. 

To many of us there is much deeper 
satisfaction and cause for hopefulness 
in the fact that, thanks to the Scien- 
tist, the Inventor, and the Mechanic, 
flying has become mechanically pos- 
sible, than sorrow over the circum- 
stance that our heads arc not heboid 
and the skin covering our scapulas 
(male or female) remains as bare of 
feathers as before. 

Reconstruction. 

It is indeed the Scientist, the Inven- 
tor and the Mechanic who must, as I 
propose to show, guide and help us on 
our way — if we are to achieve social 
salvation. 

Let our Scientists prove intelligent, 
our Inventors resourceful, our Me- 
chanics skillful, and us ready to draw 
on our combined common-sense and 
courage, there need be little fear that 
our work of Social Reconstruction will 
be brought to naught by inadequate 
human material. 

Reconstruction: That and no less we 



must attempt if we are to prevent 
diisaster — forestall Revolution. 

Simple Principles. 

The obvious prerequisite to our 
beginning our reconstructive work is 
an understanding of ourselves and 
the existing social mechanism. 

And to gain such imderstanding 
we shall follow the method outlined 
in connection with our visit to the 
California: 

We shall refuse to be daunted by 
surface and fictitious intricacy and 
the multiplicity of details. 

We shall seek out the simple es- 
sentials, and we shall remember: 

First, that every mechanism what- 
ever, no matter how vast and com- 
plicated, is built on simple princi- 
ples. 

Second, that it would be imprac- 
tical and futile to specify "a prac- 
tical remedy" or to lay down a 
"practical program of reconstruction" 
till we practically agree on social 
principles and practically agree on 
the purpose of the proposed social 
reconstruction. 

Third, that laying hold of sucli 
principles is like unlocking a doer; 
and a knowledge of the principles of 
the social structure is the key (and 
the only key) to an understanding 
of the whole of it and of how it 
works. 

This last implies that it is needful 
also to note that to know how a 
mechanism works is as requisite as 
to know how it is made. Its work- 
ing as well as its structure must 
be understood. But a knowledge of 
a structure almost certainly brings 
with it a like knowledge of its work- 
ing. 

It will therefore be our task to 
separate society into its very few 
and very simple main parts, and to 
observe their activities and the work- 
ing of society as a whole. 

Natural Groups, 

Obviously the units of society are 
the human beings comprising it. 

As I have set forth earlier, these 
human units naturally arrange them- 



50 



TECHNOCRACY 



selves, by virtue of their economic 
traits, into natural groups. These 
groups, then, are the essential (main) 
parts of the social mechanism. 

When we have learned to under- 
stand them, their interrelation, and 
their functioning — their natural work- 
ing — we have learned to understand 
society as a whole. 

Having learned this, our ideas re- 
garding "Reconstruction" will have 
become clear, precise, and practically 
usable. 

Unchangeable Human Nature. 

Let us take a forward look here, 
in order to better know where we 
are at, and where we are going. 

We cannot change human nature; 
on tliat we are, I hope, agreed. The 
human units are beyond the reach of 
Reconstruction. 

Can we reconstruct their group- 
ings—the social elements? 

If I am right in holding that- these 
groupings are the expression of im- 
manent economic traits, and thus the 
working out of "human nature", 
these too are fixed facts. 

The essential social elements are 
also not subject to Reconstruction. 

W^hat, then, in heaven's name, I 
almost hear you cry out, is there 
left to reconstruct? 

Ask — Tin Lizzy. 

If you had dealt as mucli with ma- 
chinery as I, you would not be puz- 
zled. And you will cease to be puz- 
zled as soon as you reflect a little. 

And — your tin Lizzy can tell you 
all about it. 

Ask her, nicely and properly, she 
will tell you: 

Her besetting vice is friction; but 

Fernwald, Berkeley, California. 
November 11, 1920. 



without friction she could do noth- 
ing — either praiseworthy or reprehen- 
sible. 

Lacking friction: instead of being 
a jocund joy, she would be use- 
lessly futile tinware. 

She will skittishly skid on a greasy 
road, or stall in loose sand because 
of — insufificient friction. 

But, also, she will refrain from 
these improprieties, answer her 
brake, and conform to your will only 
— because of friction. 

It is friction getting in its deadly 
work when her joints and journals 
screech for oil; and it is friction 
that compels you to everlastingly buy 
and replace her worn-out in'ards. 

But, and finally, she speeds her 
flirtatious chu-chu-ing way on the 
level and chug-chugs laboriously up- 
hill — God bless her — by friction. 

Freedom of Choice. 

One and the same force, then, will 
work both "good" and "ill", depend- 
ing on the conditioning interrela- 
tions — our selected relation toward 
the neutral natural force, — our pur- 
pose. 

Just so, one and the same machine 
part, or one and the same social ele- 
ment, will under different conditions 
of interrelation or coordination pro- 
duce totally different or even oppo- 
site results — depending on our choice 
of purpose. 

In brief, what we can reconstruct 
is the interrelation of the social ele- 
ments. And such reconstruction 
must proceed from a clear concep- 
tion of what end the whole social 
mechanism is to serve — our National 
choice of purpose — our National Ob- 
jective. 



IS HUMAN FREEDOM ABSOLUTE OR IS IT 

CONDITIONED ON RATIONALITY 

AND NATURE'S LAWS? 



Technocracy 

Second Series 

PART III. 

A Working Method for a Workable Understanding 
Of the Social Problem and of a Workable Reconstruction. 

By William Henry Smyth 

Note: Proceeding from the understanding reached in Part II, that the 
natural social forces are fixed facts which cannot be altered, Part III shows 
how they may be utilized for a human social purpose. 

It shows that while human freedom must act within rigid laws of na- 
true, it is not thereby Hmited. The intelligent realization of this fact has 
made the mechanic effective and his accomplishments possible; failure to attain 
this insight in social relations has produced what we call the "social problem." 



Microscopic Scratch to Panama Canal. 

Seemingly there is no physical task 
beyond the capability of the Me- 
chanic: 

Measuring and weighing niacliinefv 
accurately determining relations of 
ultra-microscopic minuteness up to 
those of cosmic magnitude; machines 
for production, for transportation, for 
reclamation, for communication; ma- 
chines of all grades of size and of 
power, and of capacity, and of preci- 
sion — from bolometer measuring vari- 
ations in pressure of light-waves trav- 
ersing infinite space to dreadnaueht 
delivering its accurately placed and ir- 
resistible thousand-ton blows; from 
the hundred thousand in an inch ac- 
curately spaced diffraction-grating 
scratches to Culebra eartii-gash of the 
Panama Canal: 

These are some of the works of the 
Mechanic. 

Methods Right and Wrong. 

Clearly it is pertinent to our in- 
quiry to ask: How does he do it? 

When we note in one department of 
human effort certainty and success, 
and in another confusion and failure, 
it is more reasonable to infer that a 
deep-seated difference in method ol 
procedure is involved than that the 
brains and intelligence of humanity 
have accidentally drifted into the one 
and deserted the other department. 



The validity of this inference is em- 
phasized by our common impression 
that Mechanics are more or less hum- 
ble and low-brow, commonplace and 
ordinary fellows, while our Econo- 
mists, Sociologists and Financiers are 
by-and-large haughty and high-brow, 
brainy and rather extraordinary per- 
sonages. 

The Mechanic's Wisdom. 

Probably tlie most characteristic at- 
titude of the mechanic toward the 
forces and materials with which he 
deals is unquestioning acceptance of 
the fact that he cannot change or any- 
wise modify the laws of nature or the 
qualities of materials. 

The mechanic, like the rest of us. 
wants to accomplish a multitude of 
purooses. Having determined upon the 
object of his desires, be it a machine 
to do something, or a change in the 
location of physical things, he pro- 
ceeds upon the assumption wliich I 
have indicated: that he is debarred 
from changing or even modifying 
either the laws of nature or the char- 
acter of materials; and so sets to work 
to get a clear understanding of these 
laws and of the characteristics of the 
materials involved. Then he so se- 
lects his relation to the appropriate 
forces and materials that thereby 
(through their natural cause-and-ef- 
fect functioning) his purpose is accom- 
plished. 



52 



TECHNOCRACY 



Nature Dynamic 

But, what do wc mean by "Laws of 
Nature"? 

We do not mean a catalogue of in- 
ert, dead "facts." 

A law of nature implies motion, not 
rest — Universal Energy in universal 
orderly activity — it is not a static, but 
a dynamic concept. 

It is the description of a process and 
the conditions under which it runs. 
Essentially it is a precise statement of 
the simple notion — based on experi- 
ence — that if something happens, 
something else will happen as a con- 
sequence. 

Nature is dynamic — it is eternal Do- 
ing. 

Ceaseless change is of Nature's es- 
sence. 

Even what we call inert matter is 
constantly changing and undergoing 
elaboration and displacement. 

What does not change are certain 
relations, which we spell out under 
the notion of cause and effect. 
' Thus a law of nature is the expres- 
sion of what is ever changeless within 
the ever changing. 

Freedom Through Knowledge. 

It is such clear and adequate under- 
standing of and conformity to the laws 
of nature that gives to the Mechanic 
his freedom of action — his certainty, 
his success. 

He goes to his task neither cowed 
by the irresistible natural forces nor 
ignorantly contemptuous of them. He 
knows them: and with his objective 
clear before him, he so makes his 
selection among them and so chooses 
his relation to them that his work may 
be accomplished through their service 
— through Universal Energy. 

The Mechanic's purposive freedom 
(expressed in his accomplishments) is 
made effective through knowledge of, 
but by. Nature's Causative Activity. 

Neutral Nature. 

Nature is neutral to Man, to his 
hopes and his fears, his projects or his 
lack of them. 

Neutrality, however, does not neces- 
sarily imply passivity. There is a neu- 
trality in action as well as a neutrality 
in rest: A swimmer's choice of direc- 
tion is not diminished if he can take 



advantage of currents flowing in the 
chosen course, but on the contrary, his 
effective liberty is thereby enhanced. 

And the last word of Science is that 
"Nature" is an infinitely directioned 
but orderly flow of Universal Energy 
— currents infinitely directioned and 
available to liberate all who will pa-, 
ticntly study them, and to realize all 
their rational purposes. 

It is in this sense that there is truth 
in the otherwise inexact statement 
that the mechanic has learned to "con- 
trol" nature. 

As a matter of fact, he does not 
"control" nature. 

As a matter of fact, also, nature 
does not "control" him. 

Doing the Impossible, 

Some of you will remember the 
time, not so very, very many years 
ago, when aeronautics was still in 
the balloon stage, and when at our 
own university here in Berkeley one 
of our most revered and renowned 
and forward - looking scientists 
"demonstrated" that flight by a heav- 
ier-than-air contrivance was a phys- 
ical impossibility — as contravening 
certain laws of nature. 

As we all know, the Professor was 
wrong. But his error did not come 
from overrating the laws of nature, 
but from underrating man's freedom 
and ingenuity in choosing his rela- 
tion to thein. 

The fact of gravitation is beyond 
the will of man and mechanic — leave 
it or lump it. It is just the same as 
it was when the Professor asserted 
the impossibility of the aeroplane. 
Yet •now the overhead whirr (that 
still thrills some of us) has become 
so familiar that busy men hardly 
look up. 

How was this seeming miracle ac- 
complished? 

In essence: by a design calculated 
to put the aviator in suitable speed 
relation to that proverbially lightest 
of things, the air, and thus its nat- 
ural (upthrust) resilient energy coun- 
terbalances natural (downtlirust) 
gravitational "pull". 

In short, the mechanic utilized nat- 
ural forces appropriately — placed him- 
self in appropriate relation — and thus 
attained his desired objective. 



TECHNOCRACY 



53 



But, the mechanic, no more than 
the animal, the fish, or the bird, 
"controls" these forces of nature. 

Conditioned: Not Limited. 

The wind blowcth where it listeth. 
Of the forces of nature man cannot 
alter a jot. But he has practically 
unlimited scope for determining his 
own relation with regard to them. 

Man does not control nature. 

But man can utilize the active 
forces of nature— without limit. 

The "Practical Mechanic" has 
learned this lesson, as he has also 
learned to utilize nature to attain his 
own objectives — hence his success. 

The Social Mechanic (sociologist 
and economist) has learned neither; 
— hence his failure. 

Considering the limitless extent and 
infinite complexity of nature, there 
is thus given to Man an equally un- 
limited scope for his activity — even 
to the point, as shown by the prac- 
tical mechanic, of attaining the "Im- 
possible". 

This holds good of all men's as- 
pirations and activities, in his social 
arrangements no less than in his me- 
chanical contrivances. In one as in 
the other he has infinite choice. 

Man may attempt the seeming im- 
possible — and succeed! 

Man is free! 

What Is Freedom? 

With respect to the laws of na- 
ture, and the mechanic's attitude to- 
ward them, may we not now feel 
that we are on firm ground? 

But, what do we mean by "free- 
dom"? 

Freedom! Invoked by myriad- 
voiced chorus, called in vain by ig- 
norance and folly! Spirit of de- 
mocracy, yet not understood by de- 
mocracy! 

Endless foolish talk of freedom, 
with all manner of etherial attenua- 
tions of metaphysical abstractions, 
perfervid declamation, profound mis- 
conception ! 

What I mean by Freedom is ex- 
ceedingly simple; but directly this 
meaning is grasped, the light it sheds 
on social relations becomes all-illu- 
minating. 

Freedom in matters social is pre- 



cisely what I have shown to be the 
mechanic's freedom in his dealings 
with the forces of nature. 
No more, no less. 

Free to Choose. 

The mechanic is not free to change, 
he is free to choose the facts and 
forces of nature. He is free to use 
them as he wills, to his own and 
others' good or — hurt. 

Neither can you or I change the 
social forces, the social materials. 
But you and I and all of us to- 
gether are free to choose and use 
them for a predetermined purpose 
and our advantage; but unused, they 
— with cosmic indifiference — quite 
commonly run to our undoing. 

The human units and essential 
group elements of the social struc- 
ture and their natural laws are as 
much nature-given, nature-made and 
nature-determined, as the units, ele- 
ments, and laws of the mechanic's 
constructions. They are the facts, 
the data which we must accept, as 
the mechanic accepts the character- 
istics and functions of the wood, or 
clay, or iron, or wedge, or lever, or 
whatnot of his craft. 

The Only Way. 

If Society and Social Reconstruction 
are to exercise freedom, it can only 
be by wise selection and purposeful 
utilization of the material oflfered by 
nature. 

Chemist, electrotechnician, metal- 
lurgist, farmer, plant "originator", and 
animal breeder — all (in effect) so ap- 
preciate the rationale of their activi- 
ties, and thus gain success. 

When the stock-breeder wants cows 
that produce more milk or heavier 
beeves, he does not pray, nor employ 
magic, nor serve, notice of specifica- 
tions on nature. What he does is to 
get busy with actually existing cows 
and beeves, in whose make-up he 
has no say whatever; and by apply- 
ing his knowledge of genetics and 
crossing the appropriate strains, he 
finally gets what he is after. So 
far from "controlling" nature and 
essaying to dictate to her, he is her 
humble, patient and painstaking pupil. 
And so it is that he, after all (in 
eflfect), "makes" her do his will. 



54 



TECHNOCRACY 



Let "Nature" Do It. 

No one will more heartily agree 
with the Mechanic's Philosophy, as 
I have outlined it, than my friend 
Luther Burbank. He knows in high- 
est degree how nature's "secrets" may 
be learned; not evoked by magic or 
any form of wizardry; not wrested 
by flying in the face of nature's laws 
or by nullifying natural forces; but 
gained by patient search, by persist- 
ent study, judicious choice, and intel- 
ligent application to a well defined 
purpose — objective. That is, exercis- 
ing one's freedom in choosing his rela- 
tion to the facts of nature. Man did not 
make the myriad-spike-armed cactus. 
But, Burbank has induced "Nature" to 
make the heretofore hostile cactus, 
spineless. 

And so also, Dr. Jacques Loeb, Dr. 
Rittcr, and the other biologists search- 
ing for the secret of how "life is 
made" and conceivably to "make" it 
themselves, they all, I feel confident, 
are imbued by the same understand- 
ing and in essence follow the same 
method. 

Re "Social Problem." 

This and no other must ])c our 
method in dealing with our Social 
Problem. Not otherwise will a (hu- 
manly desirable) New Order ever 
arise from the existing Social Dis- 
order. 

For this Disorder is the resultant 
of natural (social) forces, forces to- 
wards which men, failing to exercise 
their freedom of choice, have taken 
no defined and socially purposive po- 
sition at all or an irrational position, 
i. e. in opposition to natural social 
forces. And these social forces will 
and must obey their immanent laws 
and run their nature-appointed course, 
even to the obliteration of civilization 
and civilized man's destruction, unless 
and until he becomes fully aware of 
the situation, learns to know the social 
forces and their laws which he con- 
fronts, and deals rationally with them 
as does the mechanic with the natural 
forces in his department of effort. 

Let Man — in social relation — but 
reach such competence of insight and 
competence of action as the Mechanic 
has already attained and the horizon 



of the socially attainable will be ex- 
tended immeasurably. 

Scepticism. 

It is not unnatural that so many pro- 
posals for social betterment should 
encounter scepticism. The man who 
waves them aside with the (to him) 
conclusive "'impossible," is less of an 
impossibilist than the typical "reform- 
er" who makes them. For those pro- 
posals commonly rest, not on scien- 
tific knowledge of the natural laws 
involved and a competent technology 
in dealing with them, but on mere 
wish-father-to-the-t bought; from 
which pedigree nothing comes but 
futility. 

But a suggestion for social action, 
no matter how unprecedented, how 
"impractical," no matter how startling 
on the surface and to superficial in- 
spection, if it discloses itself as se- 
curely founded on the facts and laws 
of society, will claim criticism of a 
very different order. 

Only the self-interested will hurl 
angry epithets. 

Only the unthinking will then cry 
"impossible." 

Only the impractical will cry "Give 
us a practical remedy," "Give us a 
practical program of reconstruction." 

And when the basic point of view 
which I am here abbreviatedly setting 
forth shall have gained acceptance, it 
will follow that what is now labelled 
impractical and socially impossible 
will be universally regarded as the 
matter-of-course; just as the "imprac- 
tical" and "impossible" airplane of 
twenty years ago is with us, now, an 
every-day reality. 

Absurdity Rampant! 

If my extended experience with in- 
venting had not taught me so securely 
that the most formidable obstacles 
and difficulties dissolve of themselves, 
as it were, before the method which 
I am outlining, and what victories 
over the "impractical" and "impos- 
sible" may thus be won, I do not 
know that I should have the heart for 
any sociologizing; so great and gro- 
tesque is the contrast between what 
humanly is and what humanly ought 
to be. 

Look about in any direction: You 



TECHNOCRACY 



55 



find absurdity running rampant — run- 
ning Society. 

Ubiq. H. C. L. 

Charmed if not charming symbol 
of man's economic ineptitude — 
H. C. L. 

Tons of paper and printer's ink and 
myriad dynes of linguistic energy have 
been used up in vain speculative ef- 
forts to track it to its lair, to stop its 
soaring, to understand, to curb, to con- 
trol it. 

And while the writing and disputing, 
learned and unlearned, arc at their 
hottest, — lo! things mysteriously be- 
gin to happen. 

Howls and Grins. 

Wool drops 50 per cent and — a mil- 
lion-dollar howl goes up from the 
sheepmen. 

Wheat, which sold at tlirec dollars a 
few months ago, is now precariously 
hanging about two dollars. The price 
of cotton has been cut in two since 
spring. Cattle and hogs on the hoof 
have slumped. Prices of staple fruits 
are down — billion-dollar-shrieks from 
the agriculturalist. 

City man grins. 

Why Blame Anyone! 

In the why of these ground-and- 
lofty acrobatic performances o f 
"prices" I am not at present interest- 
ed. But what does interest me — and 
you — at this point is the difference in 
emotional response from different por- 
tions of the American people. 

Roars of rage from the farmer: 

A nascent smile — a flickering grin 
— of hope on the faces of the urban 
consumers. 

Would you blame the farmer? 

I don't. 

He must raise "high-priced" crops 
on his "high-priced" land — blessed 
are the land-speculators and boosters! 
How else could he make "interest," 
let alone a "profit," on his "invest- 
ment"? — blessed our system of finance 
and financiers and "financiering the 
enterprise." 

And is not everyone legitimately, 
necessarily, "naturally" out for the 
boodle? 

Said a Hayward poultryman a little 
while ago (a very decent good-natured 



fellow, quite undistinguished for re- 
pacity) : "I hope eggs go to two dol- 
lars a dozen." 

Can you blame him? 

I don't. 

Do vou blame any "profiteer"? 

I don't. 

Would you blame Air. City Con- 
sumer for rejoicing at Mr. Farmer's 
sorrow? 

I don't. 

Fifty-Fifty. 

Let us note parenthetically that Mr. 
City Consumer's joy is, as yet, only 
anticipatory. 

The decline in values on the farm 
has not, as yet, penetrated into his 
grocery store — with marked visibility. 
(Maybe it will not.) And his (declinc- 
in-wool-inspired) scouting of clothiers' 
show windows has not, as yet, dis- 
closed any hope-confirming tags. 

Perhaps, indeed, though wool go 
down fifty per cent, suits may go up 
another fifty. 

Why not? 

Is not our "economic system" equal 
to almost anything — preposterous? 

It "naturally" makes every citizen an 
enemy of every other! 

"One man's misfortune is another's 
opportunity." 

Of course! Naturally. 

Serious Questions. 

What arc farms and farming to tlie 
city dweller? 

What is the city man to the farmer? 

What is the householder to the 
store-keeper? 

What are they all to the laborer? 

What is the laborer to them all? 

What are producer and consumer to 
the Nation? 

Where is there any understandable 
and unifying interest? 

Civil War. 

You cut yourself down to one fire 
in your house because coal is so dear; 
but West Virginia and Alabama have 
been enjoying the diversion of civil 
war, because the coal miners want 
more wages. And they are as far 
from sybaritism as you arc from be- 
ing a miser. 

But the Coal Barons do not lan- 
guish. 

Truly our grotesque "economic sys- 



56 



TECHNOCRACY 



tern" is equal to almost anything pre- 
posterous. 

Obviously it is equal to producing 
the quaint, Alice in Wonderland, re- 
sult of placing one good and amiable 
American in Hayward and another 
equally good and equally amiable 
American in Berkeley into a relation 
of active antagonism in life and death 
hostility of interests and aims; hos- 
tility as real, as necessary, as "nat- 
ural," as if they were members, not of 
a supposedly unified nation, but sub- 
jects of two atrocious nations — at 
war with each other. 

Quaint hardly expresses it . . .eh? 

Those Patched Breeches! 

Why has v\'Ool, let us say, dropped 
in price? 

Because, say the "economists and 
financiers," the world's market for 
wool is overstocked. 

Think of it! 

But how on earth has it become 
overstocked? 

Think of it. 

If a tithe we are told about Eurone 
is true, half her people have hardly 
rags wherewith to cover their naked- 
ness. And we dwellers in the richest 
land of the earth (and, as we some- 
times fancy, owners thereof) have we 
not been performing marvels of skill 
and patience (ye gods, how long it 
seems!) in patching sleeve elbows, in 
patching shoes, in patching breeches 
seats, in patching our ragged tempers, 
and in pretending that — if we have one 
— an overcoat is appropriate for sum- 
jner wear and — public appearance. 

Why? 

A sheepraiscr in the Sacramento 
valley will tell you he is compelled to 
warehouse his present season's clip 
indefinitely. 

Why? 

"Wool is not now saleable"! — 
"There is no demand whatever!" 

No demand for wool! Mark that. , 

And, of course no one feels the 
slightest desire for a new suit of 
clothing. 

So there you are. 

Truly, quaint beyond expression. 

How do you like it, Mr. Man? 

And, how do you like it, Eriend 
Lady? 



Futile Tinkering. 

But these examples of our prepos- 
terous "economics" are obvious and 
commonplace. I should not waste my 
time and your patience just to speak 
of such trite matters; or to add an- 
other "practical" suggestion for "bet- 
tering" them to the futile scrap-heap 
of "practical" palliatives. 

He would, indeed, be a fool- 
mechanic who would waste time and 
material tinkering with details of a 
mechanism after having on careful ex- 
amination decided the device to be 
wrong in basic principle. 

Why waste futile anger and energy 
on Financiers and Profiteers when 
they are perfectly "natural" elements 
in our "economic system," as our na- 
tional hocial aggregation has devel- 
oped from its ages-old "natural" her- 
itage? 

1 would not, if I could, stop Prof- 
iteers from profiteering, nor Finan- 
ciers from financiering, nor punish any 
one for playing our fool-game accord- 
ing to its crazy rules — better than the 
rest of us. 

Effective Reconstruction. 

What I am driving at is a working 
method, for a workable understanding 
of the "Social Problem," and a work- 
able Social Reconstruction. 

However difficult in application it 
may appear to the unthinking, or how- 
ever undesirable to the self-interested, 
the method I propose has the ef- 
fectiveness and simplicity of ration- 
ality. It has that perfect simplicity 
which lies at the heart of useful dis- 
covery and invention. 

The discernment for which I plead 
is that our society is wrong in basic 
principle, is based on anti-social prin- 
ciples. It is a left-over from our Eu- 
ropean heritage and — headed for the 
same outcome. 

Its various parts have developed in 
obedience to natural forces, are work- 
ing in obedience to natural forces, and 
the outcome will be the natural re- 
sult of the interaction of these nature- 
given materials and natural forces. 

Elements Unchangeable. 

It is childishly futile to try to tinker 
any social machine part — any social 
element — into workabilil}^ by itself. 



TECHNOCRACY 



57 



In the first place, these elements 
are in their essential qualities unmod- 
ifiable. Just as the mechanic's ma- 
terials are unchangeable. 

In the second place, even could they 
be singly altered, what good would 
that do? They still would remain es- 
sentially isolated elements, aggregat- 
ed in this or that connection, but un- 
conibined by any unifying human de- 
sign into a humanly purposeful whole. 

Society a Machine. 

It has not been efifectively recog- 
nized, despite the universal use of the 
phrase "social body," that society is 
a body — a mechanism. 

Just as a man's body is really a ma- 
chine, a heat motor, as mechanistic as 
a Tin Lizzie or a battleship; just as 
an army (in every proper sense of the 
term) is a military machine: so a 
Town, a State, or a Nation is equally 
mechanistic — a true Machine. 

Let us look for a moment at the 
effective implication and significance 
of this notion . . . 

When your body is "sick" and an- 
noying you by not obeying your will, 
it is acting in obedience to universal 
law with the same precision, regular- 
ity, and mechanistic predictableness, 
as when it was "well" and acting re- 
sponsive to your will. 

The only real difference is: in one 
case you like, and in the other you 
dislike, — the outcomes of the same 
universal law, the same mechanistic 
natural order. 

Fernwald, Berkeley, California. 
November 15, 1920. 



Just so with the social body. 

If we do not like the outcome of 
our social organization, and if we will 
use our constructive imagination to 
conceive an outcome more to our lik- 
ing and use our freedom of choice to 
choose such outcome; and if we have 
initiative to undertake, and construc- 
tive skill (and courage) to rearrange 
the nature-given elements in suitable 
relation to social forces and factors 
to produce the chosen outcome — then 
the solution of our "Social Problem" 
will be in process. 

And as I have said, "sickness" which 
in the human body brings crises, 
boding physical death, in the social 
body brings— Revolution — portent of 
National Dissolution. 

Purposeful Social Evolution. 

It is quite useless to promulgate 
"practical" progi;ams and platforms, 
and childishly impractical to prate 
of the common interests of (dead) 
"capital" and (living) "labor" and the 
need of bringing them together, and 
so forth, and so on and on . . . 

The only measure that will prevent 
Revolution is Purposeful Social Evo- 
lution: Social Reconstruction of such 
kind as will turn what is now a sense- 
less anti-social, internecine warring 
aggregation, into a purposeful work- 
ing combination; into a real Nation — 
a Nation unified by a common pur- 
pose — a National Objective. 



IS NOT HUMAN PURPOSIVE FREEDOM 

MADE EFFECTIVE BY KNOWLEDGE OF 

NATURE'S CAUSATIVE ACTIVITY? 



Technocracy 



Second Series 

PART IV. 

Labor, Skill, Tally, Organization and Their Functions: 
Production, Distribution, Direction. 

By William Henry Smyth 

Note: This the concluding part of Technocracy — Second Series gathers 
up the preceding considerations for their logical conclusions. 

The solution of the social problem is shown to lie in man's making use 
of his unique self-conscious freedom and rationality for purposefully co-ordinat- 
ing the nature-given and nature-elaborated elements of the social structure; 
which the essay describes in their essentials. In this way man makes himself 
a participator in the miracle of creation, the evolutionary process, and his 
own physical, social, and spiritual development. 

The alternative presented is, on one hand: animal instincts running their 
"natural" course to social chaos, to revolution; on the other hand: human 
reason utilizing the instincts, for the attainment of social order, true social 
evolution. 



Basic Requirements. 

Feeding and Breeding are the funda- 
mentals of social life. 

Any circumstance — "natural" hap- 
pening, or artificial arrangement — ad- 
verse to these basic requirements is 
anti-social and socially disruptive. 
Conditions favorable thereto are con- 
ducive to social development. 

Inherited Animal Instincts. 

Not only are these requirements 
basic to human socieJ:y, but they are 
and always were equally necessary_ to 
all forms of "lower" animate exist- 
ence. 

Thus it is that (to ensure feeding 
and breeding), "Nature" during the 
aeons of experimentation which we 
call "Evolution" has developed a va- 
riety of fixed preservative instincts, 
traits, and characteristics in the animal 
world. From the animal world, we 
as animals hav^e inherited such of these 
instincts, traits, and characteristics as 
were necessary or most favorable to 
Man's survival and present dominance. 

"Gifts": Peculiarly Human. 

In addition to these, man has ac- 
quired, attained, or been endowed 
with "gifts" peculiar to himself which 
render him unique — Consciousness of 
Self, Freedom of Choice, and Purpos- 
ive Rationality. 



A Cosmic Invitation. 

By these latter acquisitions, Man 
has been placed in the peculiar situa- 
tion of being an invited participator 
in the evolutionary process, including 
also the working of this cosmic pro- 
cess as concerns himself. 

This momentous invitation he is 
free to accept or reject. 

Accepted? 

If he accepts the invitation he as- 
sumes its inherently implied terms. 
He assvmics responsibility for the out- 
come of his interference with the 
evolutionary process. He gets the 
benefits which his intelligent co-opera- 
tion ma}^ bring him, and the accom- 
plishment of his own desires, but, also, 
he must bear the pains and penalties 
of his own foolish actions. 

If he accepts the invitation to take 
a responsible part in his own evolu- 
tion, he has at his disposal all of the 
active forces of Nature including those 
which mo'tivate himself, — his bodily 
mechanism, his instincts, his procliv- 
ities, his economic traits, his intelli- 
gence — to make or mar himself and 
his institutions. 

Rejected? 

If he does not accept the invitation 
to participate in the miracle of ere- 



TECHNOCRACY 



59 



ation and the Cosmic Enterprise, the 
Great Undertaking goes on without a 
flicker of disturbance — indifferent to 
his existence — or what amounts to the 
same, regardless of outcomes which 
are humanly desirable. 

Outcome. 

All of this means that human soci- 
ety as it exists today is the end-result 
of these various factors. 

If the outcome does not please or 
suit us it is our own fault and the 
remedy lies in our own hands — with 
the proviso that we realize the terms 
of the implied contract and under- 
stand the nature of the instrumentali- 
ties at our disposal with which to 
realize our purposes. 

Conditioned on Understanding. 

In brief then, all human accom- 
plishment, all invention, all attainment 
of anything "new," are conditioned on 
an understanding of the facts and laws 
of nature involved and the choice of 
an appropriate relation to them, with 
reference to the determined purpose. 

Society is a structure based, like 
everything else in the universe, on na- 
ture-given facts and laws. 

The prerequisite then to our present 
endeavor, to map out a course of so- 
cial progress, is to have a clear under- 
standing of the facts and laws of na- 
ture involved: of which the first item 
is society's composition. 

Elements. 

Man is a strong, skilful, cunning an- 
imal endowed with freedom of choice. 
Some are characteristically Strong, 
some are characteristically Skilful, 
some are characteristically Cunning. 
In others, again, these basic traits are 
merged in varying proportions. 

The Social Elements — the essential 
(or main) parts of society — then are 
the groups formed primarily by the 
working out of the instinctive proclivi- 
ties which I briefly sketched in the 
opening part of the first series of 
Technocracy. 

The Economic Traits, strength, 
skill, cunning and -the instincts, to live, 
to make, to control, to take, have 
founded and formed our social struc- 
ture, in which they are still recogniz- 
able as its four great elements: Labor, 



Skill, Tally, ("Capital"), Organization 
("Government"). 

Labor. 

By Labor I mean that activity 
which is chiefly muscular effort. It 
is obviously the foundation of all 
other activities whatever, and as such 
it engrosses the effort of the great 
majority — the bulk of "the people". 

Their motive urge is mainly "to 
live". They are impelled by no other 
special impetus towards any particu- 
lar form of activity. Those who do 
the bulk of the world's work there- 
fore find self-expression in the meas- 
ure in which tiieir work conduces to 
the satisfaction of their instinct "to 
live". 

Thwart this, and Labor balks. 

Skill. 

Skill, expressing the instinct "to 
make", must be taken in a sense wide 
enough to embrace not only dex- 
terity, but also usable knowledge of 
matters and things conducive to phys- 
ical accomplishment. The Skill ele- 
ment of society holds the scientist as 
well as the artisan, philosophy as 
well as technology. 

The function of such a Skill ele- 
ment in a rationally, purposefully or- 
ganized society is self-evident. How 
woefully far from this it departs in 
the actually existing society is like- 
wise self-evident. 

Tally. 

Whenever team-work is under way 
— or for that matter team-play — there 
is need of a record of each man's 
performance. To keep such record 
is the function of the Tally element 
in society. 

This colorless, yet all-important, 
function the cunning instinct "to 
take" early made its own. The em- 
bodiments of that urge made them- 
selves the keepers of the social tally- 
sheet — the "Financiers". 

Organization. 

The Organization element coordi- 
nates and supervises the work of so- 
ciety. It prescribes what should and 
what should not be done, in relation 
to the work in hand — the purpose. 

This element embraces the "author- 



60 



TECHNOCRACY 



ities", the "govcrnnunt", the "em- 
ployers". 

Necessity and Freedom. 

The quality uniformly exhibited by 
all four social elements is their in- 
stinctiveness. They have developed 
from inward necessity. 
• But there is no such inner neces- 
sity for their interrelation, their co- 
ordination and combination into a 
social machine as a whole. That is 
not a matter of instinctive urge, but 
a problem of intelligence. 

The present chaotic lack of co- 
ordination is due to lack of social 
purposive intelligence; it is the "nat- 
ural result of (and has been de- 
termined by) failure (socially) to 
exercise Man's transcendent preroga- 
tive: Freedom of Choice — freedom to 
choose his relation to natural forces 
in such manner as to make them 
subserve his predetermined imited 
purpose — Community objective. 

War of Instincts. 

Indeed, each element, far from 
uniting with the others in purpose, is 
"naturally" figliting every other for a 
greater gratification of its own "nat- 
ural" urge, and the all-embracing 
urge of instinctive self-preservation. 

It is in highest degree probable 
that, typically, the four instinct-char- 
acterized groups of modern society — 
the Masses, the Artisans, the Em- 
ployers, the Financiers — do not think. 
Thinking is not their social func- 
tion; they merely respond to the 
urge of their dominating instincts — 
the Masses to breed, the Artisan to 
make, the Employer to energize, the 
Financier to hoard — instincts which 
characterize separately many animals 
other than Man. 

These various social groups in- 
stinctively resist any social conditions 
or conventions that tend to hamper 
the functioning urge of their char- 
acterizing instinct and instinctively 
struggle for its greater gratification — 
hence our "Social Problems". 

What Is the Social Problem? 

The Scientists — scattered and few 
in number but socially significant — do 
think; it is their social function to 
think, to rationalize with constructive 
imagination. 'It is the Scientist's 



function to solve problems, to pio- 
neer, to blaze a trail into the un- 
known — to illumine the path of Social 
Progress. 

Clearly it is the Scientist's social 
function to straighten out social 
snarls, to Unravel social tangles: 

To so organize society that human 
freedom and self-expression will be 
the product of and result from the 
rational rclationing, the coordinate 
functioning and gratification of the 
human instincts. 

That is the Scientist's great task. 

That is our Social Problem. 

Purposeless. 

Socially, Man has remained a mere- 
ly instinctively acting animal. He has 
never unitedly pondered a social pur- 
pose, reflected on a freely chosen 
united objective. 

When our inspection of the Cali- 
fornia had disclosed its constituent 
elements, we knew as readily for 
what purpose they were to Avork to- 
gether: we knew what the battleship 
was for. 

But for what socially determined 
end do our Financiers finance, our 
inventors invent, our laborers labor? 

What is the purpose of Society? 

Is it not true that, judging from 
society as it is, we must say. it has 
no purpose? 

Is it any w^onder then, that we 
have a "Social Problem", and that 
most men face it in utter bewilder- 
ment? 

Purpose Necessary. 

To deal effectively with the social 
problem requires then, first of all. 
that men becom.e conscious of a so- 
cial purpose. And a very little reflec- 
tion will disclose the enormous dif- 
ference which a difference of purpose 
efifects with regard to otherwise iden- 
tical processes. 

The same purposive skill that 
makes — feloniously breaks. 

Bees and Profiteers. 

Our profiteers have been filling 
their coffers just ae bees are filling 
their combs. Essentially their activ- 
ities proceed from the same source: 
instinctive drive to hoard. 

Bee and profiteer are equally "sel- 
fish". 



TECHNOCRACY 



61 



Each acts in obedience to the de- 
mand for self-expression. But where- 
as the utiHty of the profiteer's hoard 
(if it has any true utility at all) is 
for himself alone and prejudicial to 
society, the bee's honey hoard is for 
the whole hive. 

What "Nature" has contrived in 
thus shaping toward an ulterior pur- 
pose the instinctive activities of a 
lowly insect, men must accomplish 
in their social arrangements by the 
exercise of their distinctively human 
qualities: reason, freedom and purpose. 

No Use Calling Names. 

It is quite needless and useless to 
single out the profiteer for moral ob- 
jurgation; and In many, if not most 
cases it would be unjust to boot. His 
profit-gouging comes not from moral 
depravity, but from a special bent of 
mind, a particular ability: and our so- 
ciety, imprimis our quaint system of 
"finance," gives no scope to that abil- 
ity — except to gouge the public. 

Yet that ability — in its essence, 
instinctive hoarding — has a social util- 
ity of the highest order. And in an 
enlightened society, that is one pur- 
posively organized, it would not only 
find scope for its exercise for the 
public good, but be spontaneously so 
exercised, and with no less gratifica- 
tion for its possessor. 

The War Illustration. 

Of how this might be accomplished, 
the War has already given us a 
sketchy illustration. 

The men who were called to mobi- 
lize the social forces of the United 
States were commonly the very men 
whose pre-war activities had been 
more notorious for amassing huge pri- 
vate fortunes than celebrated for self- 
less public service. 

Between the high officials of the 
War Industries Board, the Shipping 
Board, and so forth, and the member- 
ship of a "Millionaires' Club" there 
was little discernible difference of per- 
sonnel. 

Charles M. Schwab, the finance 
magnate, and Schwab, the war-organ- 
izer, were the same person. 

All these men brought to their so- 
cial, national jobs the very same tal- 
ents that they had been employing 



right along self-centcredly — unsocial- 
ly, un-nationally. The work they did, 
their proximate functioning, was the 
same as before. 

But what a difference in social re- 
sult! 

They were acting for a different 
purpose. That really makes up the 
whole of the difference. 

The skill that feloniously breaks — 
can also make. 

Where these hurriedly assembled 
mobilizers fell short of efficacy it was 
in the measure of their failure to 
equate completely their aims with the 
National Objective. 

Greater "Temptation." 

It is worth while considering how 
it was that men pre-eminent for ca- 
pacity of self-aggrandisement, for 
their ability, to put it in plain words, 
of using the Nation for their own pri- 
vate aims and advantage, came to 
make the Nation's purpose their own. 

The outstanding fact is that they 
did it of their own free will. 

The deeper lying fact is that they 
responded to the greater inducement: 
public good was a stronger stimulus, 
a greater "temptation," than private 
profit. 

The decisive fact is that such re- 
sponse was made possible and induced 
by the (even if only crude and tem- 
porary) rearrangement of the social 
elements for the attainment of a Na- 
tional Purpose. 

Work. 

Add to this the perception, for 
which I have so often contended, that 
there is no blinder folly than that 
which sees in "work" nothing but "the 
primal curse"; and that, on the con- 
trary, doing — which is only another 
name for work — is the very essence 
and end of man's living, provided 
only it be the purposive work of his 
heart — and you have the whole foun- 
dation of the psychology of social re- 
construction. 

Order, Purpose, Freedom. 

Freedom is the first law of Man's 
nature. 

Any social convention or construc- 
tion which does violence to the free- 
doin of the individual, of the group. 



62 



TECHNOCRACY 



or of the Nation as a whole, is 
doomed to inevitable failure. 

If any single cause is to be given 
for the social failure which we now 
so anxiously face, this cause, which 
earlier I have formulated as the ab- 
sence of purposive design, may well 
be formulated as the infraction of the 
basic law of freedom. For in a chance- 
made agglomeration true Freedom can 
not arise and act, any more than in a 
void. 

It is only in a true Order, in a pur- 
posively designed and rationally com- 
bined society, that Freedom can find 
the conditions for its eflfective being, 
its self-realizing activity. 

Disorder — ^Jungle Law — Restraint. 

Obviously there can be no real hu- 
man freedom in a society based on 
primeval jungle law, only license and 
restraint. When it is the sole acting 
principle, (even if not the preaching 
of the pulpit) that he may take who 
has the power, and he shall keep who 
can, what can be the issue but intra- 
social warfare? — and, still inore re- 
pugnant, a warfare in which victory 
is not to the strong, clean and cour- 
ageous, but to the sordid, tricky and 
cunning. 

Fictitious Freedom. 
Let us not be misled by surface ap- 
pearances. Ostensibly the mine owner 
has more freedom than the miner, the 
manufacturer than the mechanic, tlie 
merchant than the clerk. More pro- 
foundly, one is found to be as unfree 
as the other. For freedom implies do- 
ing one's reasoned will. But as mem- 
bers of a planless social monstrosity, 
no man can be a free agent. All are 
caught in the same chaotic social 
tangle; none guide their course by 
anything better than chance and their 
instinctive proclivities. 

Reason and Freedom. 
These instincts, as I have pointed 
out, are natural forces. And I have 
also shown how Man, the Mechanic, 
has achieved his conquests by bring- 
ing his Reason and Freedom of Choice 
to bear on natural forces: not in crazy 
hope of changing them, but to make 
them the realizing means for his rea- 
son and freedom — for his purpose. 



Even thus is the task of Man, the 
Social Mechanic. 

Our reconstructive effort must be 
so to reconstruct or rearrange the 
social mechanism as to utilize the 
unchangeable instincts, the economic 
traits (that is, the natural forces in 
our problem) for the accomplishment 
of a united social purpose, a National 
Objective. 

Man a Spiritual Entity. 
I have spoken so much in terms of 
mechanics that it may not be amiss 
to guard here against the imputation 
that I conceive of human life in such 
terms. My conception is indeed the 
very opposite of that. Man (though 
functioning in a mechanistic world 
through a bodily machine) is above 
all a spiritual entity; and his ma- 
terial and mechanical concerns and 
affairs are of importance only in so 
far as they affect his spiritual being. 

"Society." 

To avoid misunderstanding, it should 
be borne in mind that "Society" as 
used herein means the total of all 
those constituting the Nation — "tinker, 
tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor 
man, beggarman, thief", et al. ; but 
that Social Functioning includes only 
a limited part of their life in its 
totality. 

Social functioning is the service part 
of modern collective (gregarious) life 
— for material well-being. Its relation 
to national life is analogous to that 
which the kitchen and service part in 
a well ordered household bears to the 
life of the family. 

And, national economics is merely 
household economics expanded. 

"Society" a Machine. 

This is not the place for expound- 
ing at length my social philosophy. 
But it will suffice, as a guiding thread, 
to indicate that my conception of 
Society is the corollary of my concep- 
tion of Man. 

That is, I view society as a mechan- 
ical contrivance for the satisfaction 
of man's material needs; for the ul- 
terior object of freeing his spiritual 
self. What ministers directly to his 
spiritual wants and his spiritual life 
itself, lies as clearly outside of the 



TECHNOCRACY 



63 



social organization, as outside the ma- 
chine-shop. 

It is in this sense also that I hold 
that man does not exist for society 
(as certain ardent social reformers 
would have us imagine), but society 
for man. 

Within this frame, society resolves 
itself, structurally and functionally, 
into Production, Distribution, and 
Direction. 

Production. 

Under the term Production or Pro- 
ductive Group is implied that part of 
the community which skillfully deals 
with nature's forces and materials; 
which familiarizes itself with all mat- 
ters relating to the physical environ- 
ment of the human aggregation. Its 
function is to extract, produce and 
arrange all things and phj'sical con- 
ditions desirable and necessary to the 
well-being of the organization. 

Skilful-Strong. 

Its membership is characterized by 
skill and strength, by curiosity ration- 
alized into desire to know, and by 
a beaver-like urge — the instinct to 
make. 

This group is not the representative 
of the community, nor is its function 
that of guardian, custodian, organizer, 
supervisor, or unifier of the composite 
group, nor has it rightly any of these 
functions. This Productive Group is 
the transforming element of the Social 
Machine. 

"Labor." 

The Labor Element we find in prac- 
tice also assumes the functions of the 
Directive and Distributive Groups in 
many ways and details. And attempt- 
ing to perform these functions so for- 
eign to its character, specialized apti- 
tude, and economic trait, it does much 
harm and adds misdirected energy to 
existing confusion. 

Taking into consideration, however, 
the history of this group — its age-long 
grinding between the upper and nether 
millstones of Cunning-Strong and 
Tricksy-Cunning — the wonder is, not 
that the results are as they are, but 
rather that this group still persists 
in its efforts to perform any of its 
rightful functions, and that it has not 



long ago by the misdirection of its 
energy wrecked the whole structure; 
as it has often, seemingly, been on the 
ragged edge of doing. Were it not foi' 
its ineradicable instinctive urge, this 
doubtless would have been the result. 
It is not without significance that 
the Distributive Group is satisfied 
with present conventions and desper- 
ately fears change, while the Product- 
ive Group is fiercely dissatisfied, and 
welcomes any change. 

"Efficiency." 

"Production" has been of late very 
much to the fore in the public prints. 
The whole civilized world, our own 
country included, we are told, is not 
producing enough. Production, we arc 
told, must be increased by greater in- 
dustry and "efficiency." 

As an inventor, that is one engaged 
in devising ways and means for do- 
ing something in a new and better 
way, I may be credited with having 
a sufficiently high regard for effi- 
ciency. Yet I own that, as currentlv 
conceived and employed, "efficiency" 
is my pet aversion. Nothing provokes 
me to more laughter or anger. 

A notion of efficiency that focuses 
on the product, instead of the pro- 
ducer, misses the point completely. 
Such "efficiency" is really (humanly 
and socially) inefficiency. 

Therefore, when I outline the task 
of social reconstruction as an appro- 
priate organization of production, dis- 
tribution, and direction, there are to 
be constantly held in mind and applied 
the ultimate criteria: a free unfolding 
of the spirit, a free manhood, a free 
nation. 

Distribution. 

Under the term Distribution or Dis- 
tributive Group are implied those indi- 
viduals whose function in the social 
organization is to keep tally and effect 
the distribution of products and 
wealth equitably and impartially to 
all the individuals of all the groups 
in accordance with their effectiveness 
and the best interests of the commun- 
ity at large. 

A truly magnificent function! 

Capitalist. 

The "Capitalist Element" in prac- 
tice, as the "Money Power" or "the 



64 



TECHNOCRACY 



Interests", interferes most energetic- 
ally and unjustifiably in matters 
wholly outside its sphere. 

It has, in fact, assumed, through its 
taxing power, the functions of "Gov- 
ernment" and control over the life and 
activities of every individual in the 
community. It has missed its way and 
is more distorted (if such be possible) 
than either of the other groups. To it 
is attributable in greater measure the 
social disturbance and confusion at 
present existing. 

This group is characterized by an 
economic trait due to its (Tricksy- 
Cunning) origin — its members have 
an inherent parasitic tendency and a 
bee-like hoarding urge — the instinct 
to take. 

Tally. 

This group is not the community's 
representative any more than is the 
Productive group; it is not the guard- 
ian or unifier; nor has it any of the 
functions of government, though it 
has assumed many of them. Neither 
does it deal with nature's forces or 
materials; it has no concern with phy- 
sical environment or natural re- 
sources; it does not extract or pro- 
duce things from nature's stores; it 
does not make, produce, or create 
wealth; its functions are neither gov- 
ernmental nor productive in any sense. 

It is simply the bookkeeper, the 
clerk, of the community — the record- 
ing or tabulating element of the so- 
cial machine. 

Tricksy-Cunning. 

And yet it has arranged conventions 
of distribution for its own exclusive 
benefit. 

It has appointed itself an unofficial 
and irresponsible custodian of the 
comnmnity's wealth in process of dis- 
tribution. Out of the community's 
wealth flowing through its channels, 
it pays itself such Avages as it deems 
its due for performing these services 
and functions. In addition to this, it 
retains possession of various forms of 
conventional increment accruing to 
the flowing wealth during the distrib- 
utive process. These increments are 
deemed, by tacit acceptance of con- 
ventions made by the Distributive 
Group, to be its property. So this ac- 



quisitive group acts as distributive 
agent for producer and the commun- 
ity, and custodian of the products, 
while at the same time it is active as 
an untrammeled trader on its own 
behalf in and with the community's 
wealth. 

Direction. 

By the terms Direction or Directive 
Group is implied that part of the na- 
tion which neither produces nor dis- 
tributes, but represents the whole 
composite group, the community. 

It is that part which, as representa- 
tive, is guardian, supervisor, and uni- 
fier. Its function is to facilitate the 
correct working of all the ramifying 
parts of the other elements, so as to 
bring about harmonious co-action of 
the entire social organization. It is 
the "governor" or strain and speed 
equalizer of the social machine. 

Government. 

The "Government", in practice, ex- 
ercises all these social functions in- 
extricably tangled up with the pro- 
ductive and distributive elements in 
most of their details. 

Government makes, manufactures, 
and exploits; it keeps tally of pro- 
ducts and distributes them more or 
less ineffectively; and while remain- 
ing Government in name, it per- 
forms all these other functions to 
such an extent that it is difficult 
to determine which most definitely 
characterizes it in reality. 

This confusion of function seems 
to be the logical outcome of the 
(Cunning-Strong) genesis of the 
group, with its inherent lust for 
power and dominion — the instinct 
to control. ; 

Social Mechanic's Task. 

What then is the task of Man, the 
Social Mechanic? 

Primarily, it is to extricate the ba- 
sic three-fold elements of the social 
mechanism from the present confu- 
sion and distortion; and, in the light 
of and under the guidance of Science, 
so to organize these fundamental 
functions: Production, Distribution, 
and Direction, that they will serve 
the social purpose, the national ob- 
jective. 



TECHNOCRACY 



65 



What the Trouble Is. 

As it stands now, the Social Ma- 
chine is a product of nature-made 
conditions, and not a construction of 
self-conscious human intelligence di- 
rected to the accomplishment of a 
predetermined human purpose. 

Man has never attempted to organ- 
ize his Social Machinery to accom- 
plish a socially unified object. And 
Nature does not stop, simply because 
man acts like a fool. Nature truly 
abhors a vacuum — especially a va- 
cuity of intelligence. 

Man has tinkered with many social 
details — he has never tackled the So- 
cial Problem! 

That is the whole trouble with the 
Social Machine. 

Social Problem 

The situation is not unlike that of 
a machine-shop in which a lot of 
mentally deranged mechanics would 
find themselves while gradually and 
unequally convalescing toward ra- 
tionality. 

They find the engine and machin- 
ery (Nature) all running smoothly, 
but also they find themselves (with 
inore or less bewilderment) indi- 
vidually and in bunches, marvclously 
and solemnly busy doing, with great 
skill, all manner of grotesque stunts: 
stoking the furnaces with their wom- 
en and children, feeding their young 
men to the ponderous grinding and 
crushing machines; tirelessly dump- 
ing the most valued and useful prod- 
ucts of their bodies, brains, and 
skill, to the smashing "dead-falls" 
and scrapping "go-devils", to be 
crushed to human slimes and refuse; 
and in a multitude of other waj's in- 
geniously employing their (Nature- 
made) facilities and capabilities to 
produce all kinds 'of silly outcomes — 
unlikable to their awakening intelli- 
gence. 

The condition thus disclosed they 
call their "Social Problem". 

Man Is Free. 

Man has a living Godlike soul 
which is free. As a "person" — a spir- 
itual entity — a Man is not a machine, 
is not subject to control by any 
power in the Universe except him- 
self, and except in so far as — by an 



exercise of his freedom — he volun- 
tarily submits. 

In so far as he does submit to 
force or irrational control, he be- 
comes a mere product — a machine; 
he contracts his own soul and di- 
minishes that transcendent quality of 
Godship which makes him a ISlan — 
his Freedom. 

A Purposive Social Machine. 

I firmly believe that Man is, and 
the Universe is, so constituted that 
Human Intelligence can construct a 
Rational Social Machine; that if Man 
earnestly desires and has the cour- 
age seriously to undertake the task, 
he can make an infinitely more 
smooth-running, humanly efficient, and 
humanly purposive arrangement than 
the humanly objectless, inhumanly 
cruel, and incredibly wasteful Stone 
Age animalistic abortion to which he 
now submits — that Alan can make a 
Social Machine worthy of Man, the 
World Alechanic. 

Human Intelligence or Animal 
Instincts? 

"Nature", while on one hand seem- 
ingly reckless of "waste", is on the 
other obviously economical — struct- 
ures, functions, and "gifts" not used, 
atrophy and disappear. 

If then Man, in social relation, fails 
to use his "gifts", these will atrophy 
— be recalled. And Man's social devel- 
opment will run not in accord with his 
intelligence, but in accord with his 
animal instincts, dominated by the 
most basic of all, the anti-social (in- 
dividual) self-preservation instinct — ■ 
dog-eat-dog — jungle law. 

Science a Fulcrum. 

It may seem that I have made of 
the existing social disorder an ar- 
raignment of Man's competence. I 
have charged him with folly, with fail- 
ure to use his greatest gifts: reason 
and freedom. 

Perhaps he can bring forward exten- 
uations. Perhaps the time had not 
come — till now. 

Perhaps there has been neither lack 
of human intelligence nor lack of wil- 
lingness to use it. Perhaps he really 
could not use it, did not know how 



66 



TECHNOCRACY 



For one thing he lacked, which has 
come only in our own day: Experi- 
mental Science. 

Science is a firm fulcrum for the 
lever of thought. 

It is a fulcrum securely resting upon 
the eternal facts and laws of nature. 

It is a fulcrum that rests upon 
phenomenal truth, which rests upon 
Nature's immanent Essential Truth 
that makes for universal right-eous- 
ness — mechanistic validity, personal 
worth, social right. 

Technocracy. 

The philosophers and thinkers of 
the past lacked that fulcrum. At the 
best, they could be only good guess- 
ers. There is no lack of intelligence 
or high spirituality in Plato's "Re- 
public", in More's "Utopia", and in 
their many followers. 

But they all lacked, and all they 

Fernwald, Berkeley, California. 
November 21, 1920. 



lacked was, the firm fulcrum of 
Science. 

This we now. possess. 

Now only has Technocracy become 
a realizable ideal. 

This transcendent acquisition and 
necessary instrumentality — Science — 
is now ours to freely use or freely 
abuse — abuse to our irrecoverable 
hurt or utilize for our ever increasing 
and true prosperity. 

This is our signal acquisition as 
compared with the past, our signifi- 
cant point of progress. And by its aid 
(if wc choose) we (socially still in 
the pre-scientific period) may at last 
achieve also social progress. 

And thus, by the means of nation- 
ally organized Science, we may be- 
come the first real nation, a truly 
united people with a worth-while na- 
tional objective — a true Industrial 
Democracy — an intelligently purpose- 
ful TECHNOCRACY. 



CAN MODERN MECHANIZED SOCIETY SAFELY RELY 
UPON TRADITIONAL ECONOMIC CUSTOMS? 



Social Universals 

THE INDIVIDUAL. 

The main function of society is to oppose its 
combined effectiveness to every natural and 
artificial condition which tends to hamper the 
freedom of the individual in so far as the acts of 
the individual are consistent with the community 
objective. 

SUSTENANCE. 

The products of effort are the results of life 
energy expressing itself through an individual 
upon his environment to the end that this in- 
dividual may and shall express more individual 
life. Ownership of products, therefore, is as 
essentially inherent in the producing individual 
as are the faculties from which the products flow ; 
thus products are, in right and in reason, in- 
alienable from the producing individual either by 
himself or by others — except for their equivalent. 

MUTUALITY. 

Equal liberty is the natural right of every per- 
son to the end that purposefulness may be ex- 
pressed and function freely, limited only by per- 
fect mutuality. 

INCREASE. 

The women are the natural wards of the com- 
munity, for its life and well-being are inseparable 
from theirs. By right of her womanhood's 
natural function, every woman is therefore en- 
titled to maintenance and protection as a first 
charge upon the community resources. Realized 
motherhood places the community under obliga- 
tion proportional to the benefit accruing to it. In 
this benefit the mother is, in equity, entitled to 
participate directly. 



FAMILY. 

As the social and the true poHtical unit, the 
family (as a unified group) is entitled effectively 
to voice its unified objectives, and to be repre- 
sented in the conduct of all community affairs. 
(Male- and female-suffrage tends to engender sex 
antagonism.) Society starts with the union of 
the sexes ; social functioning should start there 
also : family suft'rage — one family, one vote. 

PROGRESS. 

The community's most valuable and vital asset 
are the children, therefore self-preservation makes 
it imperative that the highest intelligence and 
unremitting effort be expended upon their prep- 
aration for carrying forward the national ob- 
jective. 

OPPORTUNITY. 

Every individual is entitled to equal oppor- 
tunity (i. e, without social or economic handicap), 
to the end that self-expression- may have fullest 
scope and the individual thus be enabled to reach 
his highest effectiveness for self-realization and 
for the welfare of the community. 

PROSPERITY. 

Nature's resources are its gifts to all ; they 
are man's inalienable environment ; they are his 
common heritage and his common birthright. 

INHERITANCE. 

As it is only by and- through the organization 
of the community that the individual can socially 
function, it is inherently right and reasonable 
that the surplus product of that functioning 
should accrue to the community at his death. 



TECHNOCRACY 
IMPLIES SCIENTIFIC REORGANIZATION 
OF NATIONAL ENERGY AND RESOURCES 
COORDINATING INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 
TO EFFECT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. 

SHOULD THE SELFISH CUNNING OF FINANCE OR 

UNSELFISH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 

MANAGE INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY? 



*> 



AN AIMLESS MAN AND A 
PURPOSELESS NATION ARE 
EQUALLY FUTILE FRAGMENTS 
OF RAW MATERIAL IN THE 
EVER GRINDING MILL OF 
NATURAL EVOLUTIONARY AND 
DEVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES: 
LACKING NATIONAL PURPOSE 
WHAT GOAL HAS PATRIOTISM 



